Trump's Tech Career, Power Tools, Say His Name, G650 vs BBJ

Welcome to Technology Brothers, the most profitable podcast in the world. Today, we are telling the story of Donald Trump. Not because it's the day before the election, not because this is a political show. This is a tech show. We never discuss politics.

I don't actually think a single political subject. I don't think we have yet to cover a single political topic.

I'm blissfully unaware.

And we're not going to start today.

Yeah, not going to start today. But we are covering Donald Trump today. Not because he's the former president, not because he's running for. For president again. We are covering him because he is a tech founder. And we need to talk about the technology angle of the tech company he started, Truth Social. I've had a running joke for a while with a bunch of friends that, you know, Donald Trump might be the best tech entrepreneur of the last two or three years. And, yeah, obviously it's kind of a silly thing because people don't think about Trump as a tech founder, but if you actually look at the numbers, I couldn't name another company that got to a $10 billion valuation in tech in less than two years in this recent cycle.

Yeah, it's one of those things you can, you know, saying is somebody good or bad is usually very objective, but in this case, there's metrics that we can discuss. And going from 0 to 2 billion in two years. 10 billion, sorry, 0. 0 to 10 billion.

The stock's at 6 billion now.

Yeah, it's been three years. I guess it's a little bit volatile, which we'll get into. But.

But it's crazy because everyone did expect it just to completely rug and be worthless. And I don't know, maybe that'll still happen. Nothing here is financial advice, but it's. It's just a fascinating story of, like, how one of these major celebrity deals gets done, how people as big and larger than life than Trump work. And there was a big, deep dive in the Economist that we're going to kind of use as the backbone of research. Truth Social called it a hit piece. I think it's actually pretty neutral. You come away from it just kind of learning some things. There's some good, there's some bad, and we'll kind of go into what that hit piece means. But let's start back in 2016. Trump was kind of this outsider candidate. He was the first. I think he was the first president to never hold elected office of any kind before winning. And he ran this very unorthodox campaign. Tons of just posting on Twitter the best. Yeah. I think.

Why would you want any other role?

I think at one point he was posting something like 40 times a day, and I think during his presidency, he posted something 50,000 times or something like that.

He puts us to shame.

I know. Legendary poster.

And he had been on the record on. There's like, a very specific interview. I think it's back in the 90s, maybe early two, I think 90s, maybe 80s, where he, like, explicitly says, like, I wouldn't want to be a part of, you know, public office.

Really? Oh, I don't know that interesting. I know that. I mean, he's had, like, an obsession with the media and kind of understood. Understood the, like, the asymptotic returns that come from being. Being a media personality for a long time. He had this rule early on that was like, he would never turn down an opportunity to be on tv, no matter what it was, even if it was going to be bad. He was like, I just want the exposure, because exposure is just so important.

Yeah. He's the original, like, he's the poster child of, like, no attention is bad attention. Almost.

Yep. Yeah. And he. And there's that story about how he, like, fought tooth and nail to get on the billionaires list, on the Forbes list. And it was like, everybody else, all.

The other billionaires or like, real billionaires, like, like, paying to get taken off of, like, whatever.

Don't want to be a hostage.

Yeah.

You know, I don't want to be extorted. And Trump's like, please. But yeah, I mean, during the. During the Trump administration or during, like, one of these sagas, there's always a question about, like, what is Trump actually worth? And there was always. And his. His argument was like, well, I'm a billionaire because I have, like, brand equity.

Yeah.

And it's very funny because now he's kind of converted that brand equity in some way to this, like, meme stock, and it's like, it's kind of liquid. And he kind of does have a lot of money now, so it's hard. It's much harder to make the argument that he's not a billionaire now.

Yeah. And I think he had gone through and, you know, he had seen how owning a business is a great way to convert influence into ebitda. Right. Where, like, there was, like, a huge amount of the pressure over the years and sort of naysayers were saying, oh, he uses Mar a Lago as a way to. For people to buy favor with the Trump family in a similar way that, you know, Hunter Biden has. Has had an esteemed art career as well.

Yeah.

Which is. You know, one could argue that that's another way. Yeah. But I think that could get a little political.

Yeah. So I think the whole story starts essentially right after January 6th. Massive riot at the Capitol. Lot of pressure on Trump and the tech community kind of comes together and de platforms him all simultaneously. He gets his Facebook, YouTube, Snapchat, and his beloved Twitter account. He gets kicked off of all of those, and he got deplatformed from, like, Shopify and a bunch of other things. I think there was a rumor at the time that they were, like, all the CEOs were just in a group chat together. And so there was a little bit of moment where it was like, okay, shutting down the. He's still the sitting president, because the inauguration was on the 20th. Kicking the sitting president off of social media is a crazy move. So they had to all be in unison and be like, yeah, we're all gonna do this. And a lot of pushback at the time, even though January 6th was really crazy. But what's interesting is that within just a few days, there was a plan in place for Truth Social. So this all started when. When a pair of former contestants on Trump's reality TV show, the Apprentice, Wesley Moss, who's a financial advisor and actually has a YouTube channel with, like, 20K subs. This guy, Wes Moss, he talks about, like, how to retire early and this.

How to retire early. SPAC, a company to 10 billion.

Wait until you hear the end of the story. I'm not kidding. And then Andrew Dean Litinsky, who is a Harvard grad, he now goes by Andy Dean. I think it has a radio show. But these two guys, these two former Apprentice contestants show up to Mar a Lago, and over. They meet with Trump on January 26th. So just six days after January 6th, like, the dust has very much not settled.

Not wasting any time.

And they meet with him, they share cheeseburgers, and. And they describe their vision for, like, Trump's new media empire, which is crazy. I mean, my takeaway is obviously, like, you know, working with Trump is like, you know, like, extremely volatile. There's a lot of things that could go wrong. But the takeaway for me is just like, if you have the opportunity to go to, like, a billionaire's mansion who has, like, an insane amount of some sort of cornered asset in Trump's. In Trump's case, social capital, it's like social capital. But even if it's like, somebody who's like, oh, yeah, they're Sitting on, like, massive forest reserves or, like, water rights and, like, you have a chance to go there and sell them on a vision for, like, what they should do next. Yeah, that's going to be extremely, extremely valuable.

Yeah. And, yeah, it's an example of, you know, the market is efficient in some ways, but deeply inefficient in other ways. We. I have a friend who is a health and wellness influencer and basically the first person that came and pitched him on doing a supplement company. He was just like, sure, that sounds great. The business does, like, you know, millions of dollars a year in revenue now, so you can just do things. You can just pitch things. Right. And these guys, like, you know, had they waited even another few weeks, maybe the opportunity never would have happened.

Yeah, yeah, 100%. It's not like these guys were like, X Facebook, x Twitter, like, really established in social media. They just had the connection to Trump through the show, clearly, like, a lot of energy. And you'll see that throughout this, this story. Like, the. The dates will go over the dates, and it's like, major milestone every, like, three months. Like, the speed of execution here is. Is very remarkable. Faster than what would be possible given the scale of the operation. So they go to. They go to Mar a Lago, they pitch it, and they kind of break down this idea of this truth social new media offering. They're talking about a streaming service, online payments network, a social media platform. And can you guess what the deal terms were? This is fascinating to me because we know a lot of companies that have done deals with celebrities, and it ranges all the way from, like, oh, we just paid them a CPM deal and they posted on their Instagram to, oh, we gave them a couple points of equity to, like, these 50, 50, 50 deals that happen every once in a while. I know some people that just did one of those. In this case, Trump got 90% of.

The new company, which, in hindsight, was very fair. Yeah, I mean, the real enterprise value is. You can. There's almost a direct line between the company's enterprise value and Trump's social capital. And you can see the fluctuations there. It's interesting. I would love to. I don't know if this will ever be shared, but I wonder if there were other competing bids and people were like, there's no way we can give him 90% of the cap table. Like, that would never make sense. And those people left, like, $1 billion on the table?

Basically, yeah, for when it was trading at 10 billion, literally billion. And so these guys got. I Mean, they split the rest. So I think, I think Wes and andy got maybe 5% each. And then of course there were dilution and you know, equity grants after that. But still like when you think about what, where they were going and they clearly had a vision of like a billion dollar, multibillion dollar exit, essentially, like pretty good terms for not, you know, for like a couple of years of work basically. And so they are trying to set up financing, but instead of going, I think they actually did pitch this in the Valley. And I think some VC firms passed on like a traditional deal, but very quickly they go straight because the VCs.

Would look at it and be like, all right, you have a non operating partner with 90%, it just violates back out. Yeah, you would have to be very contrarian to do it.

Yes, yes, extremely. And and then there's also all this volatility about like, okay, well if Trump runs again, maybe he'll deprioritize true social. Or if he wins, then that could invite a whole bunch of other scrutiny. It's like there's so many failure modes. It totally makes sense not to do it. If you're a traditional vc, even if you're hunting for like, oh, something that's edgy, it's still really risky. And so they decide to go the SPAC route. This was 2021. SPACs were like super, super hot there. And I actually haven't been involved in a spac. I know, you know, some guys who have done them, but I think most people think about a SPAC as like going public in the sense that like the company drives the process and says, like, we are going public. Okay, like now we have done that. But with SPACs, it's much more like the SPACs exist. There were like 326 different SPACs, which are these, you know, special purpose acquisition companies. They're holding companies, blank checks. So they, they IPO the company with like basically no financials. So it's a very simple process with the sec. It gets approved, it has a stock ticker, but it's just trading at the value of the cash. And then they go and acquire a business that exists. And then once they do that acquisition, they can rebrand or rename the ticker and then the company's public. So the company doesn't need to go through all the traditional process and all the oversight. So it happened a ton.

A lot of beautiful financial innovation.

Incredible. And I'm sure it'll be back. And it actually like SPACs are not entirely new. Something that Was like revitalized in 2020, 2021. They've existed for a while, these like reverse mergers. But Moss and Latinsky, Andy and Wes, these guys start calling all the different SPACs that are out there to try and get them to bite on the truth. Social deal. And so they call 326 candidates. Which is hilarious because, you know, Chamath got a call.

Yeah.

Because he had like seven different. He had like IPO A, IPO B, IPO C pod at the time. And they were definitely like, you would have kept going. Oh yeah. Like you have so many of these, like, let's, let's do it. But everyone passed essentially for, for reasonable reasons. Liberals wouldn't touch it. Even those who agreed to meet were wary. Many said no right away. At least one person yelled like, get out of my office. I don't want anything to do with you. There's this funny quote.

Yeah. You have to think about how toxic the Trump brand was then. Right.

It was post Jan.6.

Couldn't have been more.

Now there's been this like anybody, anybody.

That was passing like, had like infinite reasons. Even if they thought it could do well.

Yeah.

It just almost wasn't worth the career risk for anybody to go and do that.

Even the people who liked Trump and maybe they supported him in 2016 or 2020. It's like it was very clear that Trump's like star was waning at that moment. This whole 2024 cycle has just been like a surprising revival of the Trump brand.

But there's a case study on the human spirit.

Yes. But there's this interesting quote from Merida merger, which was One of the SPACs that like talked on the record about it. Said I was like, I don't want to be on half the country's radar. I don't want anyone looking up my name. I have kids. And he said once he started to dig in, he was like, it looked like a quick cash grab rather than the long lasting business venture. We don't do the cult of personality thing. And so, you know, Adam and Wes start, they keep calling it. Eventually they find this guy, this swaggering Miami based investor named Patrick Orlando. What a great name for a guy based in Florida.

Patrick Orlando, nominative determinism, essentially.

It's great. And so it'd be great.

We got to, we should do a deep dive. He might be brother of the week at some point.

Maybe. Yeah. And so Patrick Orlando had already taken one of these blank check companies public. He was sitting on a spac. It's A search fund. It's just like the. The Harvard MBA that raises 10 mil to go buy some H Vac company, but on a much bigger scale, raising maybe 100 million. And then. And then going and finding the. The business.

And during this time, this time, there was so people that all Those hundreds of SPACs out there were going and hitting up every possible. Like they were. There was way more SPACs than there were qualified companies. Right. And so I was golfing with an.

Investment banker around this time, and. And. And he was like, oh, like your company, Lucy might be a target for spac. Right. And I was like, no. Like, we're like, pretty small still. Like, this wouldn't make sense. I wouldn't want to be a public company.

He's like.

He was like. And he was like, well, what's wrong? Like, is your cost structure not big enough? That was the problem. It wasn't the revenue. It was like. But if we could have justified, like, oh, yeah, we're burning $100 million a year, so it totally makes sense. That would have been justification to spac, not the revenue, because the revenue is immaterial.

Yeah. And there was. There was so much capital available at that time. Time basically was a last resort for most companies where if you couldn't really go public and you couldn't access private capital. Yeah, that was the best route.

Yeah. And then also, like, like, which had.

A huge adverse selection problem.

Yeah. And also that I feel like there's just been this massive drought in, like, liquidity for VC funds for a long time where, like, the companies were all marked really high and they were great, but there was just no actual payouts to any LPs. And so if you had, like, maybe you were holding on to some power law winners that would, like, IPO properly, but if you could get some early liquidity and just kind of clean up your portfolio by spacing a bunch of things, that felt pretty good because you could distribute the shares. Now, of course, what happened was that a lot of these companies got locked up and then the stocks tanked and so the LPs got dumped on and didn't really wind up with anything good. But. But yeah, I mean, around this time, like, Trump was really, really anxious to rejoin social media and just kind of get his content game back up.

He's a poster. He's a poster, just like the founding fathers.

I didn't know he did this, but he. He started a blog called from the Desk of Don. And, And. And he was thinking about, like, going direct and kind of doing his own thing. And there was a lot of tension about this deal, but eventually they got it done. And so on June 4, 2021, Trump and Orlando signed a preliminary agreement to work together. As far as Moss and Latinsky were concerned, the money was coming. Now all they had to do was build the company. So think about this Jan.6, insane riot. Like, the worst press for anyone in the entire world. Like, really dark time getting impeached. I think around that time, too, like, very quickly, like, just miserable. The Jan, 26th, they meet, have cheeseburgers at Mar A Lago, and are like, let's do this thing. And then June 4th, less than six months later, they're like, okay, we have the money lined up. We're going public with this company. Yeah, insane. You can just do this. It's crazy.

So, cheeseburgers. He could have been having cheeseburgers at the Rosewood.

Yeah.

Instead he was on the. In Florida, Mar A Lago.

And so they bring in on this guy, Josh Adams, who doesn't exist online, and he brings on Billy Boozer as technology officers.

Great names.

I know. Josh Adams and Billy Boozer. So Billy Boozer's a tech guy, and they start building this group of software developers because they're actually going to go build this thing now that they have the funding lined up. And so they're doing a lot of interesting things. They're working at this wework in Atlanta, and. And it's basically all tech developers, engineers who have kind of dropped out of society or, like hardcore libertarians or, like, living off the grid. And then the entire management team is just former apprenticed, like former Apprentice stars. It says at one point there were three or four. Three or four of the people there were contestants on the Apprentice. So they're just like, okay, we need somebody in a suit to, like, do biz dev, like, get. Get a charismatic person who's been on tv. It's kind of genius. I really think we need a new apprentice.

It is funny, though, that. Because that's kind of how hiring generally works. It's like, oh, yeah, I work with this guy like six or seven years ago. Like, he's. He's good. I trust him. He's just like the best guy for the job that you're aware of at that time. And all it takes is, like one text message and a call, and he's like, cool, let's do it.

Yeah, we really need a new. We really need a new apprentice. Maybe we should do it. Something that's like, Mr. Beastified for the. For the next generation. Hit us up in the comments if you want to be on our Apprentice show. So, and then they bring on this, like, remote software engineer from Macedonia, and they're basically forking Mastodon. Are you familiar with this open source project? And so they're using a lot of that as, like, the base code to build the network. And it's, it's like, pretty janky in the early stage. Like, very much like a fork of this thing doesn't really look really good. But they all have faith that, you know, Adams and Boozer and these other guys will like, you know, fix it.

Up before they launch, move fast and break things. Work for Meta, it'll work for truth.

Yeah. And so a lot of people at the company are basically just blackpelled on social media generally because of the de. Platforming. And so they're, they're all there kind of on a, on a mission, just saying, like, okay, you know, it seems like they all support Trump generally, but they're more there about, like, free speech and like, the importance of, like, like an open platform. And that's kind of how all these things get started. Like, even Mastodon, I think, got started in the same way. Blue sky had the same thing. And there's been a couple other. There's so many of these clones at this point. I think Jack Dorsey's working on a new one. There's that crypto one and the Farcaster. Yeah. And the whole, and the whole plan is always like, we're going to be more open, more consistent, less, you know, mercurial about the policies and whatnot. And so these, the developers, they, they're quoted here saying they found it outrageous that Twitter had suspended Trump's account. The problem, as they saw it, was pressure from corporate advertisers whose play it safe attitudes. Adam summed up as, you can't put our brand right next to the guy that's saying all the mean words. And I kind of get that. Like, you know, if you're, if you're at Twitter and, and every advertiser is calling you, like, I don't want my, I don't want my ads appearing next to Trump. But what I always found weird was like, the advertisers never had a problem advertising in the middle of, like, a Trump rally that was being advertised or that was being broadcast on NBC or cnn. It was only later when it was like, okay, Trump's like this. Really?

Yeah, it's kind of a cop out of being like, oh, we're getting all this pressure from this other group and just like putting the. Putting the blame on them versus taking responsibility as a platform. Because it's. It's a lot. You know, having, like, a programmatic ad is just dramatically different than a podcast ad. Right. Where there actually actually is, like, an endorsement happening.

Yeah. And. And you'd think that, like, yeah, people would be able to segment out, like, okay, this ad clearly is not related to this in this incendiary tweet. And usually, like, if you're an anti Trump guy, like, the algorithm will serve you, like, the quote tweet that's dunking on him.

Yeah.

So, like, you're. It's not. It's very rare that you're seeing just, like, pure Trump tweets that are like.

Yeah. In the platforms. You have to imagine there's millions and tens of millions of people who would only use the platforms to consume Trump content.

Yeah.

And so the platform. It wasn't the platform's incentive to boot him. Right. Because they're just in the business of capturing attention and monetizing it.

And that was the story of all of the Trump rallies that got broadcast on CNN and NBC prior to the 2016 election. Like, that. Those were phenomenal for ratings. So everyone had these incentives aligned to promote Trump. And he got so much earned media and so much free press just because he was, like, the clown who was polling at, like, 3%, but then he won, and everyone was like, oh, shit, we should probably, like, not do that if we care about, you know, blocking him from being the president.

Yeah.

And so now he's been much more, like, you know, constrained. Although he's made, obviously, a comeback in the. For cycle, and he's been much more platformed this time around, mostly due to X and other, like, podcasts. Obviously did like, a million podcasts and hasn't had any problem with those. Like. Yeah, it is. It is weird because, you know, technically, like, when. When Andrew Tate got deplatformed, it wasn't just that they banned the Andrew Tate accounts. They actually would ban, like, Tate fan club number six five. And that.

And that was his whole acquisition strategy was this, like, affiliate model.

Yep.

Where anybody could monetize the Tate.

Yep. And so he would go on a live stream talk for, like, three hours. His little minions would, like, clip it and then go viral with those and then be selling.

A lot of those people that were clipping had more ARR than average YC batch.

Yeah. But, but, but that was like a. That was another, like, unique, like, moment in, like, platform censorship or de platforming. Because it wasn't Just Andrew Tate's account that got banned. It was. It was people that were posting Andrew Tate content. And so there was a worry at the time that the same thing would apply to Trump. And if Rogan had Trump on, Rogan would lose his YouTube account. But that didn't happen because I think there was just like too much pressure, too much pushback, which I think is good because, like, Rogan should be able to talk to.

It's also very different that the Tate minion accounts were purely trying to sell Andrew Tate courses. Whereas if Joe Rogan is covering something in the news, it's just news.

Yeah, exactly. And so the first decision that they really have to make a truth social is the. Is kind of the monetization model, like the business model. And so they, they have this. They don't want pressure from advertisers because that was the whole thing that started this problem with, with Trump getting kicked off of all the major social media platforms. And so they were thinking about either charging for the service itself, like, you know, $10 a month just to go on it, like Spotify, or do something else. They had this idea and they landed on this business model similar to the one used by Twitch, the video streaming site where most of the content is free, but fans can tip or subscribe to creators, and the site takes a cut of that. And this is an interesting question that I think I keep coming back to as I dig into the truth. Social story is like, how much, like, whether you think it went right or wrong. That's kind of an exercise for the listener. But the question is, are the problems or benefits due to strategy or execution? Because I think that if you went to, like, you know, Ben Thompson, who studies, you know, these platforms at Stratecheri and asked him, you know, what the best business model is for a social network, he would almost. He would want you to push to like, the extreme ends. And that's what he was advocating for on Twitter. He was saying, like, you either need to be completely free and tons of ads that are really well targeted and kind of be the aggregator like Meta. And that's why Meta has done really well, even post att. And when Apple pulled back on all the targeted ads, Apple's Meta's been doing really, really well, or you need to be completely closed. Pay only, paywall only. Like what Ben does at Strikery where, you know, you only pay for everything.

Yeah. And Trump could have thrown up a substack and gotten to nine figures of ARR very, very quickly.

Oh, yeah.

But he wouldn't it would have taken much longer to become a billionaire that way.

Yeah.

Unless, you know, and in many ways, like Truth Social fits into the theme of Trump's life, which is he is an entertainment brand. Right. And Truth Social media is an entertainment experience and that you can go on there and see funny things and laugh and retweet things and things like that. But now it's become an entertainment product in the form of a ticker symbol where it just provides, you know, daily entertainment in the form of watching the number go up or down, usually very dramatically.

Yeah, it's a meme stock. And so it's interesting because it seems like at the time there was a debate between the executives, like the apprentice business guys and the developers and the software engineers, who are more on like a. They're more like missionary versus mercenary. And so the missionaries, who are very, all about like, openness and durability and censorship, resistance, they don't want to do an advertising model. And they actually say here that, that, you know, for many users, ads and other profit boosting ploys had ruined the experience of platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. And I think that's an, that's an incredibly incorrect take.

Yeah, I think that, yeah, this is. We've talked about Jordy's Law, Right. Which is the higher quality the content, the more ads you can jam in it. And if you have a media product and you can't put a lot of ads in it, it usually is just not that great of a product. Yeah.

And also, I mean, there's the real. There's the revealed preference, which is that every Facebook and Instagram and Twitter user says, oh, the ads are so bad, and yet they keep logging on way more than they would if they paid.

And with X, I want the ads to get better. Yeah, I want more targeted ads. The only reason I'm annoyed by ads on X is I'm like, this isn't relevant to me.

Yeah, it's very clear that the whole iOS privacy app tracking, transparency thing was just political infighting between the big tech companies. I don't want to see bad ads. I want to see good ads for things that I'm shopping for.

I like when I'm talking with my friends about something and then something pops up hour later, I get an ad for it. It's like a bookmark that I never had to.

It's, you know, it's like I actually, I actually know people that if they're, if they're shopping for something, they're like, okay, I need to make a Decision about like, which printer to buy. They'll go just like visit all the printer websites.

Yeah.

And then it's like they hold court on Instagram and they're just like, come to me, you know, oh, like I've been doing some research on, you know, which, which jitter free coffee company I should buy. Let me visit all their websites and then they'll all advertise to me and whichever has the greatest ads, I'll buy. But, but, but I don't need to make decision based on your website. I'm going to make the decision based on your ads.

Yeah.

Which is very interesting. But then I mean, the other thing is that ads are just much better at price discrimination. And so if you have, if you have a billionaire in your audience and you also have a college kid in your audience and you're charging $10 a month. They both pay $10 a month. But, but if you're doing an ad based model, you'll get $1 in ads from the college kid and you could get $1,000 or $10,000 from the billionaire. Because, because it's targeted to, you're going to be able to target more premium ads. And so that, that price discrimination really, really maximizes value capture for these, for these digital platforms. And that's why ads really are like the end all, be all of monetization strategies for these companies. It's interesting. Do you know Dalton Caldwell at Y Combinator? He's a YC partner. He started a company called App.net. do you remember this?

No.

Back in, I want to say like 2012 or something. Yeah, he, he started a paid Twitter. It was, it was, you know, you had to pay to use it. And the whole idea was that the money would go to developers who'd be able to develop things on top. Kind of like Farcaster, where it's like open. And he had a really tough time with it because it was hard to get that viral growth. Whereas with Twitter it's like you can always hear a news story and be like, oh, I should get on there. And then you're on. And then the more you use it, the more money they make. And the money that they make is directly proportional to the amount of time that you spend on the site and your wealth, essentially. So if you're buying, you know, Rolexes and Lamborghinis, they're going to make a lot more money from you than somebody who's just, you know, shopping for Candy Crush or whatever. But yeah, it's fascinating. They also had this crazy struggle with their Tech stack because they didn't want to get deplatformed and like rugged by one of the tech companies. Do you remember the Parler situation where Parler was on Amazon Web Services and because a bunch of the January 6ers were on Parler organizing.

Yeah.

Parler just got booted and if you just lose your hosting provider, you're not going to be able to move over like just instantly.

This is what Matt from Anti Metal was originally working on, which is like a decentralized crypto native cloud, which at that moment, that's what the original Anti Metal was, which made a lot of sense. And it turns out they ended up evolving the company into what it is today because there was only a tiny, tiny, tiny group of companies that actually needed decentralized cloud and they weren't necessarily the customers that you actually wanted. But in that moment in time, it felt like, oh yeah, cloud should be decentralized and accessible regardless of like the political leanings of the platform.

Yep. Yeah, yeah, it's very niche. I've seen it work in. There's this rendering network for CGI where every CGI artist has a, a really beefy computer, but they're not always rendering out their projects so they can share render time between the computers. So the computer is basically always rendering and then they're rendering your project while you're rendering their project and there's like render tokens in between. They have like a crypto thing and I think it's, I think it's been like one of the more successful, like use cases, even though it's kind of a small market. So then they, you know, they're hiring more people to, to scale up the company, like actually build this thing. They hire this interesting guy, this Baptist of South Asian descent named Justice Epin, who is canceled for tweeting God smites unbelievers. Isn't that crazy? Like, he was an engineer at some company and another engineer posted on Reddit complaining about him and he was disowned by his friends and called a bigot and a fascist by strangers. And what's weird is that like, based on that response, I feel like he must have tweeted something crazier, like tweeting. I feel like some. You could go tweet God smites unbelievers right now and people would be like, so true.

Yeah.

Or like, isn't that just like a.

Straight up from God, from Bible?

Like that's not like that controversial, I.

Think, but I guess the intention matters.

Yeah, but he had, he had a Very bad. He had a very bad go of it. And so he was one of those people that was like, really driven by the mission. Right. And then it says. Also among the other recruits was Ryan Lackey, a libertarian programmer who had been working since 1990s to stop what he thought of as excessive corporate and governmental interference on the Internet. And do you recognize this guy? Ryan Lackey.

Looks like a boss. I know that guy couldn't in Miami.

Yeah, this.

Not this year.

Yeah, this year.

Really?

Yeah, I interviewed him about prepping. Yeah.

Oh, that's him.

Yeah. And I mean, he has a wild, wild story. He. He was a civilian who went to Iraq during the war just to build a business. Like, he wasn't in the military. He just went there to install satellite communications and take like, really small, like, DoD contracts here and there. So, like the. The army would be like, oh, we have some forward deployed base.

That's a guy. If he opened up a safe at 100.

Yeah.

You'd enter at any price.

And you know sealand that, like, offshore. Offshore concrete platform located in the North Sea, seven miles off the English coast. He went there and installed a server farm there. And he was like, doing their, like, it isn't that crazy. Yeah. So he. So he was there, I think he was doing, like, security and stuff. They had a man who worked at Apple. They had a bunch of other people basically just like the outcasts of tech, like, all come together in this wework.

The black sheep.

The black sheep, exactly. And it's very funny because they start, like, colliding with each other in very interesting ways because they're all like. They're all similar in how fringy they are, but they're all different fringes. So there's one guy who.

Strong opinion strongly held.

Yeah, yeah. There's one guy who describes himself as a literal communist.

Yeah. And a vegan.

And a vegan. And. And he gets it. And then like, Eepen, the guy who tweeted God smites unbelievers was observed proselytizing to his colleagues, particularly Gleason, the vegan communist. Which is so funny because it's just like you have all these, like, black sheep and they're all just like, fighting in this chaos pit.

Yeah, it's. It's not just like a group of people with differing views that are all, like, happy to be around people with differing views.

No.

Bunch of people that are like, no, I am right.

I'm right. Like, we need no government at all. Or we need a complete government.

We're going to argue until we figure this out.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But probably some interesting conversations. But then there's this like anecdote about how like. So it's all like just like chaos in this way it works. Like trying to build this thing, like forking open source projects, like working so fast. And then like when Patrick Orlando, like the big like investor, the spac owner, comes by, they have to like bring all the remote workers in to like make them look bigger and like put up big displays and like play Trump clips on the TVs. To be like, this is a real office. Like this is. This is like a real deal. And like the former employees.

Why is there no Hollywood documentary on this yet, by the way?

Well, I mean, that's the whole reason I wanted to do this story was because. Because as much of a joke as it is, this does deserve a profile in Bloomberg. The information should be telling this story because it's one of the most interesting stories in tech in the last few years.

Yeah, and I don't need the fifth mockumentary of WeWork. I want the first of Trump Social.

Yeah, Trump Social.

Freudian slip.

Totally, totally. And I mean, these interactions are so funny. It probably should be like a mockumentary or a, or some sort of movie because it's.

No, it should be a very serious documentary about a very serious technology entrepreneur, entrepreneur named Donald J. Trump.

I think Trump should go on the circuit with Emily Chang. Yeah, we need an Alex Conrad piece. Get him.

Alex, if you're listening.

Yeah, yeah, do it.

Your move.

And so, and so they're like, the tech people keep bringing like the Trump Organization, like, ideas for like, how to juice engagement on the site. And one of them is so funny. So they told Trump about the possibility of giving early adopters of the site a digital badge, something similar to Twitter's Blue Tick. Trump thought he was talking about making physical badges like a, like a sheriff's five pointed star and mailing them out to users, which is like, actually what they should have done. Yeah, they should have done that. It would have been so good. It would be such a collectible to get like the original Truth Social. Have you ever used Truth Social media? I actually signed up. I created an account just to see like, what's going on there. It's chaos.

I feel like I get the core content in the form of screenshots that are then posted.

Not even. There's very little that like actually makes its way over because it's all so boring. Yeah, it's all just like. And the ads are particularly Funny, because they're all like ads for, like, third party, like, unpaid for are. What's it called when you don't, like, register a trademark? You're not paying the money doesn't go to Trump, but it's like a Trump T shirt, basically. And he's just like, cool with it because, like, whatever. But they're all, they're all framed like the, the ad strategy there is basically to put up a poll, like a fake poll, and the poll will be like, do you support John Donald J. Trump? And it'll be like, hell, yes. Or like, no. And no matter what you click, it's just an image. So no matter what you click, it takes you to the next thing. It'll be like, do you want to take back the country from the corrupt Democrats? And it'll be like, yes or no. You can click no, it'll still take you to the next thing. And it just takes you to check out for like a $60 T shirt or like a coin or something that's like.

Well, maybe that's a good segue into their monetization and, and kind of the numbers they're putting up.

Tell me you have some.

No, no, I mean, we, I mean, you. You'd pulled up their chart earlier.

Oh, yeah.

How they've done about, about a million dollars of ad revenue in the last 12 months.

Yeah, yeah, last 12.

So they're Monet. They're not. They're. They're post monetization.

It's a story.

And focusing on, on monetization or if it's just sort of happening by nature being a big technology platform.

Yeah, but it's.

I'll let you get.

I think the numbers are. In the last 12 months, they did a little over a million dollars in revenue. They. EBITDA was negative 100 million. Net income was negative 400 million, roughly 380. And it's almost a $10 billion company. So you can think of it as like.

It's a gross story.

It's a gross story. It's wild. And so, yeah, I mean, they wind up building this site and it's actually like a very simple front end. It's like a direct clone of like every Twitter clone ever. But the back end is like, extremely complex because they need to have like two providers for everything, like two databases, two, you know, front end or two, like, I forget what they call it.

Like CDNs because, like, the uncancellable man.

Yeah.

And you had to have the equivalent back end social media platform, basically distribution.

Yeah. So. So they're so they're building all this. And, like, I think at a certain point, I think this happens a lot with, like, the Trump projects, where it's just like, he's at Mar a Lago. Somebody says, hey, I'll give you 90% of this business. And he's like, yeah, go for it. Like, like, we'll see what happens. And then they came back with, like, the SPAC offer, and he's like, oh, yeah, this is getting interesting. And they come back with, like, a site that's, like, kind of working and. Okay, like, maybe I should go deeper.

And so then I can imagine him, like, hammering out a tweet. You know, not a tweet, a post, a truth. And hitting send for the first time and seeing it lag for like, 20 seconds and then post and be like, not bad. Because he grew up in the era, like, he came, like, he became relevant in the era that it was really hard to build software products. So he had probably had other attempts and been like, this is really hard. And so just having a working product, he was probably pretty excited about it.

Well, you know, he's a printed email guy. Yeah, he doesn't. He doesn't do email on the computer. It's all printed out for him. And then he just says, okay, yeah, respond to this this way.

That's great.

And so, you know, I think as. Yes, for sure. I think as. As things start to get a little bit more real, the. The rest of the Trump. Org kind of descends. So Eric Trail start shows up and wants a piece, and Don Jr. Wants a piece as well.

Melania.

And Melania wants some shares and. And they kind of go back and forth. They're fighting with Latinsky and, yeah, they.

Try to go back on the deal and Wes Moss.

Yeah, they try and go back on the deal and they try and say, like, you know, oh, that. That thing we signed that term sheet for 90%, like, that wasn't accurate. Like, we don't want you to run this thing.

Like, which is funny because it was already so aggressive. How do you get more aggressive than that when it's.

Yeah.

Yes. It would have still made for them to do it even if they had a point at the company. But going. Trying to take them from 10, 10 down to. Yeah, I don't know.

And so they. So they issue another 3% of the company to the Trump. Org. They didn't give any to Melania. I assume it's just like, dilution on top of the existing structure. But what's really interesting is that Like Latinsky and Wes Moss, like the original guys, even though they only own 10% of the company, they must have had some block. Right. Or something. Or like the board must have been structured in a way that they could because otherwise we would just be hearing about like, and then they were gone. And like they lost all their equity and like, that didn't happen. Maybe it was just like legal threat.

But they knew what they were doing on that fateful cheeseburger.

They were like, we will give you 90% of the economics, but we want, we want gain.

They were on the Apprentice. They were on the Apprentice. They learned from the best. Donald himself. How do you. So Donald's probably sitting there being like, they're using my moves against me.

Yeah. And so like as, so they sort all that out. And as they, as they're starting to build, they do wind up partnering with Rumble, which is like the YouTube competitor that's actually like fairly big. I know some people that have worked there.

Also public, right?

Yeah, I think it's a public company. I think it was another spac.

They acquired our peers over at all in. I think Rumble acquired Colin, which is cool. Little cameo from Sax.

Yeah. And so they do have like a more robust tech stack than some of the other partners. And so the idea was, okay, maybe we get on Rumble, they can host our, our data. But at the time, Rumble, Rumble hadn't been struggling with like de platforming as much because most of the stuff they host, I mean, they host like barstool. They host. Who's that guy from get him to the Greek? You know that guy?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

He's like some sort of like former comedian now like a podcaster. Russell Brand. That's who it is. So, so they host Russell Brand. These people aren't like completely agitating and being like take to the streets. They're not the most aggressive. So I think they, I think Rumble has not had that many.

Rumble is kicking themselves for not doing, you know, trying to make a billion dollar bid for truth at that moment in time.

Well, a lot of the other companies were like Gab or Parler and Getter at this time were both talking to Trump about like, hey, why don't you come and make this one your home because we already built it and we'll give you, you know, some sort of.

They realize it's not about the tech, it's about the distribution.

Yep. That. And, and they, and you know, that Parlor and Getter, we're not going to be like, yeah, take 90% of our company yeah, there's just no way. They're probably like, oh, we'll give you 5% and we'll pay you a bunch and you'll get all this stuff. But, like, there's just no way that even, you know, once they built it, there's just too many people around the table, too many people on the cap table. So just impossible. But then on October 20th, so we're still less than a year out. The day the world was meant to learn about the merger and the existence of Truth Social, Trump summoned Latinsky to Mar a Lago. In a twist worthy of the Apprentice itself, the former president said he was once again considering a deal with Getter and asked Latinsky to convince him that Truth Social was better. Somehow, Latinsky got Trump to sign the merger agreement.

Wow.

Legend, Legend. You get called and it's just like, actually, I'm bailing on this thing. Get out of my office. And he's just like, wait, wait, wait, wait. This is gonna work.

He was summoned.

Yeah. Yeah.

That was a long. That was a long flight.

So it worked. Orland, you know, Orland. Patrick Orlando goes to the Atlanta. Wework with a magnum of Veuve Clicquot. And they pop out of the champagne. And the press release goes out that evening. And the. They call it Trump Media and Technology Group, and the plan is to give a voice to all. The tech team were excited to be able to tell friends and family what they'd been working on. The press release claimed that Trump's new media offering would be worth $1.7 billion. But within 24 hours, the stock market valued the SPAC at 10 times that amount, 17 billion. So total meme stock. For a minute, obviously for a minute it goes down, but for not much.

I think it's still.

But Even at that 1.7 billion, that makes Trump a billionaire just on that one deal, because he owns. And now he owns 6.

60%, but undeniable.

@ that point, it was still more, but it was enough to be.

Yeah, it was kind of interesting timing for this election because that was a lot of what people would try to pin him on and say, like, oh, you're not a real billionaire. Right. But now it's just like, check the market cap. You can run the numbers yourself.

Yep. Yeah. And even though, like, a lot of it's locked up, I'm sure he can borrow against it. I'm sure there's some sort of collateral. He's probably gotten some out and we'll get more out and stuff. So, yeah, it's fascinating. And so they launch and there's a bunch of, like, you know, negative press and they get attacked. And at one point, they. One of the companies that's providing their backend technology actually does close Truth Social's account. But because the tech team had built these backups, they were only down. It affected 8.5% of their traffic for three minutes. That's it. Pretty crazy.

These guys are better than cracked. Cracked, yeah.

Yeah. It's like, insane. And so, of course, they're not done yet because dear friend of Donald Trump, Gary Gensler, pops up to hit them with a lawsuit saying that the SPAC was illegal because his view was that Orlando had spacked with the idea of acquiring Trusocial. And you can't do that. You have to truly set up a blank check and not know. And so if there's evidence that it's like, oh, you're going to SPAC IPO g to acquire this company, then that would mean that you should just spac. You should just go through a regular ipo. But if you truly spec the blank check and then you get the call and you go, okay, this is what I'm searching for. I'm going with it.

Is that lawsuit still.

It's settled.

Settled.

We'll get there. But it did settle, and now everything's above board, hilariously enough. And so, of course, like, there's a bunch more problems that happen. People figure out that the company's working out of this. We work in Atlanta, and so, you know, tons of Trump haters are, like, doxxing people and taking photos outside, and they're really worried about, you know, threats to their lives, which should have been predictable. If you go work for this.

Yeah. Why were they not in Trump Tower?

Seriously, they should have been somewhere, like, secure, I would think something, I don't know, work out of Mar a Lago, I guess, or something. But now that, like, the SPAC is going through, it's. The parent company was now the most valuable SPAC in history. And all the tech workers basically consider the apprentice guys like their de facto bosses. Even though it seems like all the titles are pretty vague. The. The employees learn that there's going to be this new guy running the company, essentially as CEO, and it's. Congressman Devin Nunes steps in. Yes.

And of course, as one does, once you've gone public, try to find a great congressman to run your company.

Yeah, yeah. What a dream. But Nunes had an interesting background. So he spent two decades representing a rural area in California and was best known for his time as the chair of the House Intelligence Committee during the investigation into Trump's alleged collusion with Russian meddling in the 2016 campaign. And at that time, Nunes had accused the entire intelligence community of a conspiracy to take down Trump. So, like, he was the one congressman, or like the main congressman who was like, pushing back against the Russiagate stuff. And so that probably won him like a ton of favor with Trump because he's like, you went to bat for me on this one committee, like, thank you, I'll work with you in the future. And so, you know, truth Social employees, like, respected him for that, but they were kind of like, what is this non tech guy doing running our company? One person said, this is like going and hiring a high school baseball coach to be the CEO of Microsoft. And I love that, love that quote. Because they're like, we are Microsoft.

Yeah.

You're on like a website that pulls in a million dollars a year. There are like indie hackers that are.

Doing better than you, and you're comparing.

Yourself to a business that's worth a trillion dollars. But respect, respect. And so it's like, maybe he's actually qualified to run this. Who knows? Like, it's such a small operation, you know, whatever. So he doesn't comment in this Economist article, but there's a bunch of interesting stories about him kind of going back and forth. And interestingly, like, while he was there, he pushes for advertising as soon as possible.

Yeah.

So again, it's like this guy's completely unqualified. Like, all the employees, all the disgruntled employees who spoke to the Economist for this article are like, like, oh, he's so unqualified. He was the worst boss. He was terrible. But like, I keep seeing, like, some of the decisions he's making and I'm like, these seem reasonable. Like, advertising is the correct business model and you should run fast. And so there's a lot of, like, the new CEO told the team they needed to work harder because a lot of money had been spent. Like, like that's true. Like, they were burning a lot of money. Like, he said that they needed to do advertising as soon as possible. That's also true. Like, it's like, kind of odd to say because, yeah, he doesn't have the traditional background, but seems like he kind.

Of made decisions a lot of businesses. Common sense.

Yeah. And so, and so the tech guys are like, are like, Adams and Boozer are like, really pissed because they, they really don't want to do advertising. They're like, let's get, let's get it. Like, like, and they're comping themselves to Facebook and Twitter. They're like, Facebook and Twitter didn't have ads when they launched. But, you know, just like, they need. They need. They need a growth story.

It's that balance between. Yeah. Revenue and just traction. Right.

Yeah. There is something to be said for that where it's like, would the stock be trading even higher if people weren't like, they only have a million dollars? It's like, well, they haven't even started monetizing yet.

Yeah.

Who knows? Maybe their first month.

It probably. It probably would. I actually think it would be trading higher. Yeah. Because if you. If somebody told you. I was shocked when you told me that they had a million dollars of revenue. Right. Like, it seems like you would intentionally have to be trying not to monetize to only have that much revenue on that much attention.

Right.

I mean, it's a terrible conversion of attention to.

I mean, as a political candidate, Trump has raised, like, almost a billion dollars. Right. Just by asking for donations. So you would assume that if you went on there and was like, I'm gonna give you at least some sort of product, maybe it's like a badge or something. Like, he would be able to get, like, the tens of millions, hundreds of millions of dollars. Yeah.

Or the physical pin.

Yeah. Something, you know, you would think if he's just selling stuff, you would be able to get more because you're monetizing the same attention. But it's just very different when it's this, like, ad platform. But, yeah, very, very interesting. So at long last, the app was released to the public on February 21, 2022. So it's just over a year from that. Like, dinner at Mar a Lago over. It really is fast execution. Like, you. You have to admit it. And it's interesting comparing it to, like, Quibi. Do you remember that company, like, they spent like, what, six years in, like, stealth, raised all this money, and it just, like, went nowhere. It's like, at least they're down to fail fast. Like, respect that.

Yeah.

But of course, the launch is, like, a mess. And, like, hundreds of thousands of people spent days on the waiting list trying to sign up. Once in, they encountered glitches galore, error messages, broken links. One page on the website misspelled Truth as T R U h. Just like, general, like, chaos, which is normal.

It's all normal stuff.

But by the end of the week, Truth Social was number one on the App Store. I'm sure they got a call from.

Nikita Beer Yeah, I'm sure Nikita was actually. They were spending eight figures on intro just for Nikita just to get his advice. Yeah.

But again, like, just to remind people, the App Store is a measure of like, like, of acceleration, not absolute pure volume. So if you launch and you grow very fast, then you'll rank higher. It's much harder for.

Established app.

Yeah, an established app like Facebook to be number one, because they're not necessarily growing as much. But more than 866,000 people installed it in the first week. Instagram, by comparison, only signed up about 100,000 users in its launch week. Such a bad comparison. This is such a bad comparison because, like, Kevin Systrom was a. Was like an awesome guy in tech. He was, but he was like an intern at Twitter.

And they knew if you actually want to create a super engaged.

Yeah, you want to start small, start small.

Get the right users. Don't, don't, don't just, like, sign up as many as you.

I like that this journalist is writing it like it's a dunk. Like, oh, like, you know, got him, got him. But it's like, yeah, that doesn't mean any sense. Sense. So at this point, it is a pretty good launch. The number one in the App Store. Maybe Trump's popularity and widespread frustrations with big tech really could fuel a major new platform. And so two weeks later, on March 11, the terms of Nunes contract were finalized. He would make 750k in his first year, plus bonuses and shares in the company. And then some other people came into the company as well, but they're working 20 hours a day for six straight months. They said they didn't see their families. They're really grinding to, like, make this work, but there's just total chaos.

They really took all the core lessons from Silicon Valley history in the prior decade and just implemented them perfectly.

Yeah, but obviously things are chaotic. There's, you know, disgruntled employees who are, like, literally destroying code, like erasing servers and stuff on their way out. That's like wild thing to do. Also, like, super illegal. And like, you could face like a bunch of, like, civil penalties if you do this. Interestingly, a bunch of. A bunch of ex employees, like, wouldn't talk on the record for this because apparently in the NDA that you sign with Truth Social, you there's a $5 million penalty. I'm gonna start putting that in the NDAs. Like, hey, if you want to see my pitch deck, like, it's a $5 million fine.

If you screenshot the docs Screenshot the.

Docs and, yeah, get out of here. And so some of the tech people start leaving the general counsel, Adams and Boozer, and a lot of people are like, oh, this is like the beginning of the end. The stock went down by 10%. Yeah, the stock went down by 10% and then another 10% the next day when the tech people quit. But obviously it's like, gone back up. And there's this, like, discussion now about, like, the pre Devin Nunes era and the post Devin Nunes era, because Nunes relocated the Truth Social offices to Florida, moved all of Truth Social's data over to Rumble's nascent cloud service, signed the company up for Rumble's new ad platform. And again, this seems like, you know, maybe it's controversial and the employees didn't like it, but those all seem like really, really smart moves. Like, building a new ad platform is genuinely very hard. And I remember when, when Netflix announced that they were going to be doing ads, they wanted to do everything, like, in house and very bespoke.

Yeah. There's apps on the App Store with tens of millions of users that use other ad networks to monetize because it's just.

There's more liquidity. Yeah, exactly. And so, like, if it's something that people. I don't know if Netflix wound up actually partnering with Microsoft to do the ad network, I think they were going to do like, the Bing ad network, which obviously is very robust, has great matching algorithms and lots of liquidity. But if it's potentially good enough for Netflix, where Netflix would at least consider it and analysts like Ben Thompson would recommend it, obviously it's right for this tiny company that has just a few employees and is only a year old to not try and build everything in house, especially if they have a friendly company with Rumble that's down to partner with them. So, again, very, very interesting. Where I think the execution was good. I think the strategy might have been a little. A little lacking just in the. And this is something we should discuss more about. Like, you know, is building a new social network the right strategy for Trump generally, or should he have just done the substack?

I think it was a. It was just a timing thing. When they decided to do this. It was absolutely the best possible product to build.

And he didn't know that Elon was going to buy Axe.

Yeah.

And so. So he didn't know that he was going to get his account back. He didn't know that he was going to be able to go on Rogan on.

Has he gotten His. Yeah, he's gotten his other accounts back.

Yeah, I think he has pretty much all of his accounts back.

Yeah.

And, and he's been able to kind of do everything which has somewhat taken the air out of the Truth Social balloon because he, it's not as existential to him if he was.

Yeah, a lot of people, a lot of people thought that it would already be a zero, like full on zero and certainly not. Yeah.

So they kind of changed their, they changed their startup culture. It used to be agile teams and horizontal management. Nunes imposed a top down structure in which workers were siloed into small groups under different managers. Again like reasonable, like sometimes that's the right thing. Sometimes you want something that's very flat and horizontal. Sometimes you want something that's a little bit more vertical.

You have to wonder was there was Nunes in group chats with highly competent tech CEOs being like, hey, what would you do in this situation? And they're like, yeah, I would silo things out. Move from being a horizontal structure to like, you know, kind of verticalizing the management teams, like have build out these different functions. Like you're really going to want to have a trust and safety department that's important for any social media platform.

Totally possible.

Yeah, I guess, I guess from here. Where does going into tomorrow. We don't talk about politics on this show, but what happens to Truth if Trump is elected? Is the most natural next step for the US government to acquire the platform and use it as sort of a digital town square for citizens or where does Truth Social go from here?

I have no idea.

Is it purely an entertainment product?

It feels like it's like bare cases on both sides. Because if he wins, stuck between a.

Bear case and a bear case, I.

Mean if he wins, he doesn't need this like liquidity injection as much anymore. So I mean this is. I think Peter Thiel had a quote in who's that Axios guy? I forget. But he was doing some interview and he was, yeah, Dan Primack. And he was doing some interview and it was, the question was like what's going on with True Social? And Peter was basically like, I think it's some sort of like, like, you know, sneaky way to transfer wealth to, to get around like campaign finance rules. And so, and so that, that becomes less of an incentive. Like if you want Trump to win and you want him to have wealth so that he can borrow against that and finance his campaign or something like something along those lines. Even though he's locked up and hasn't sold the shares yet. It's like, clearly having a $4 billion asset is valuable when you're running for.

Yeah.

When you're running for president. But, but after. If he wins, then, okay, you don't need to pump the stock anymore. And if he loses, it's like, maybe he becomes less relevant. He's not deplatformed anymore. And it's not like if he loses, he'd be deplatformed again. Unless he tries some January 6th stuff again, which would be crazy.

Yeah.

So I don't know. It is, it is tough. Yeah. It's.

It's. It's not financially a Much easier long if he wins tomorrow because it's just another half a decade.

Yeah.

A lot of, A lot of attention and relevant and see, and, and it. And, And I guess the historical ways that presidents would monetize their attention would. I'm going to be president and then I'm going to. I'm going to write a book and then my wife's going to write a book and our, you know, son is going to write a book and every sort of member and that, that's like very like 20th century way to monetize attention and still works generally well. Yeah. But it could be. You could imagine a future where every president, you know, just ends up creating a social media platform because that's, that's. That becomes like the right way. Like, would you. I think Kamala could probably drive if she created a social media app after losing. If she were to lose, I think she could get a, you know, 50 million downloads. Right?

Probably.

I would, I would sign up for that.

Well, you know, this isn't the first celebrity social media company. Jeremy Renner cloned Instagram and had the Renner. The Jeremy Renner app that you could install. And it was just his Instagram feed. Isn't that insane? And you had to subscribe to just see Jeremy Renner posts and then he would like, post like extra photos, but it was just like his feed. So just like, I'm surfing today, I went to the gym and like the Jeremy Renner fan club was just like on his app. And then he eventually shuttered it. But I mean, you could imagine like in the same way that substack, like a lot of people are completely. They follow some writer and they're completely unaware that, like, substack is the underlying technology. They're just like, oh, I love, I love not boring co.

Right.

And I just. And this guy Paki is great. He must have built this website, but he's using the substack infrastructure. You can see. You can see that. You could see that happening in almost every vertical where it's like, oh, you're using Vimeo to power a website like.

A YouTube or Substack allows you to just generate your own app at some point.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. That would be interesting. So it's like you're on substack. I mean, I talked to the Substack guys about other media formats, and they allow you to upload podcasts, and they actually do allow you to upload videos. So it is possible to run, like, basically your own private video feed, like your own YouTube on substack. And you could have someone just, like, have that, you know. Okay, they're subscribed to your.

The Technology Brothers app.

Yeah, exactly.

We'd like to own that real estate on your home screen.

Yeah, but let's. Let's close out before with the, like the. The ending of the SEC fight. So even though, like, the SPAC was trading and successful because of the SEC lawsuit, the acquisition wasn't approved. And so you weren't technically investing in Truth Social. You were investing in the idea in a SPAC that had, like, a contract in place to acquire this company, but didn't actually own any of the assets yet because the acquisition hadn't been approved by the sec. And so there's this lawsuit that says, hey, it was illegal for you to do this SPAC and this acquisition. We're going to block the acquisition. But on March 24, more than three years after Latinsky and Moss got Trump to agree to their plan, Trump Media and Technology Group stock debuted on NASDAQ. They settled the case with the SEC for an $18 million fine in July of 2023. And it's very.

That's a big fine.

Yeah, it feels like a big fine.

But, yeah, I mean, they have a lot. Not in the context of the market cap now, but. But that does seem like a significant fine.

Yeah, I guess they were just like. Like, yeah, negotiating and figured out that was like, a number that they were.

Gary's bonus big that year.

Yeah. And so they get it approved, and at that point, the stock actually becomes like the DJT ticker or something like that. I think it was DWAC before, like, Digital World acquisition company or something. DWAC was the SPAC name before dwac. Yeah, it's a very funny name. So they get through. Matt Levine has a good quote in here. You know, Matt from Bloomberg, he says that the regulatory body might be sort of worried that this thing will be a big bust. And he's using the early merger talks as an excuse to prevent Donald Trump from dumping it on retail investors. So it's kind of like they're, they're like, maybe the SEC didn't actually have that strong of evidence that Orlando and Trump were talking before Ipoing, and we.

Don'T know how much. There's a huge incentive for all the Trump insiders to keep the party going through the election, because if the stock had, there was a couple moments where it looked like it was going to zero, and if it had, how that would have actually created that would have been potentially the biggest risk factor for the campaign is a bunch of Americans being like, I lost a bunch of money because of Trump. And he's maybe he is the scammer that the media like says. Right?

Yeah. And so they, they celebrate the, the NASDAQ listing with. It's funny, it's on the Nasdaq. It feels so serious for what this is.

Back in Mar a Lago.

Yeah. Back in Mar a Lago, they have the actor Jon Voight and Truth Social branded cookies. That first day, the share price touched $78, making the company worth about 15 billion, more than doubling the former president's personal wealth. Moss and Latinski, the two guys who started this whole thing, were unable to profit from the, from the moment. However, as they were locked up, they were locked in multiple lawsuits with Trump Media and Technology Group. Group. The company argued that their initial deal with Trump was void and they'd forfeited their shares because they had run the company so ineptly. And that was interesting because it's like, it was a short thing. I wonder if there was like a vesting cliff that they were trying to, like, you know, push them towards or something like that. If they had like some, some one year vest and they barely made it over, that could be like a point of contention, I don't know. But it all worked out because they, they settled those lawsuits and, and Moss and Latinski won their litigation with the company and cashed in nearly all their shares together, pocketing around $100 million. Wow. He's not gonna have to do YouTube anymore.

Yeah. That explains why he retired early.

Retire early. Seriously.

And so I wonder if he got, as part of the settlement, he got a complimentary lifetime Mar A Lago membership.

He either got a lifetime membership or a ban. Yeah, one or the other.

Yeah.

It was a high standard deviation outcome.

Yeah. I feel like Trump would be fine with them still going and spending money on the property. Because it would just be his way to be like, I still like, yeah, I'm your daddy.

Yeah. One current employee messaged a group chat, a former current and former Truth Social staff, saying that Nunes had claimed that Moss and Latinsky had stolen shares, leaving nothing for anyone else. His colleagues responded crying with laughter emojis, suggesting that they didn't take this idea seriously.

As if they were all. All the shares were sitting in the office and on the way out, they just grabbed.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

A bunch of. I feel like. I feel like if any organization was still running on physical paper stock certificates. Yeah. It would be true social.

It is funny because it's like, everyone is saying, like, oh, this is like a mess. And like, you know, like, it's poorly managed and it's like, fake. But then they're like, but also the money's real and I really want a piece like, you screwed me out of this very legitimate thing. You can't have it both ways, guys. Either you can be talking trash in the media or you can have your payout. Lesson learned there. But Trump has insisted he won't sell his shares, which now amount to about 60% of the company, which is very uncommon for a tech founder who starts a tech company. IPOs it in two years. Very, very rare.

But then it just shows that it's mission oriented. Yeah, right.

And they could. Yeah, all of these. These ex employees are really trashing it. They could probably have a hundred million people on the platform if they had any intelligence whatsoever. But again, it's like, is this a question of intelligence? Like, is this a question of strategy or execution? Like, is it.

Are they running it as a company or a financial product?

Is the product the stock or is the product the website?

Yeah, And I think we know the answer.

Yes. And so, yeah, it's.

It's basically fintech, right?

It's.

It's technology that enables a new way to.

Yeah.

Trade on Trump's social capital.

There's this very interesting quote from Billy Boozer here. He says, I had to step away from. From a role that I felt God made for me due to ethical and moral. Moral concerns. It shook me to my core. Sometimes those who share your beliefs might exploit you for financial gain. And I think that there's a lesson here about, like, like, we hear about these venture capital firms that are very difficult to work with and they're notorious for, like, firing. Firing founders. And yet when I talk to very, very aggressive founders, oftentimes they're fine getting in the ring with a VC With a bad rap.

They trust themselves.

They trust themselves and they're okay. They're like, I'm willing to get into the gladiator arena. I'm the lion. They need to be worried. And I think that there's something here where, like the, where, like, you know, it is. It is clearly public knowledge that these are some of the most hard negotiating people in the world. But if you go in and you play your cards right, you can wind up with $100 million payout like those guys did. And so maybe they will wind up hanging out at Mar a Lago in a little bit.

But, yeah, I think it's one of those things, like five, ten years from now, they'll. If they were to see Trump, they would shake hands and wink. Be like, yeah, it would just be like that.

We had one hell of a boxing match.

Yeah. It was like, yeah, going back to that fateful bite of the first burger.

Yep, exactly. And then the article closes with an epilogue about now. Trump has moved on to a cryptocurrency project called World Liberty Financial Financial.

I had somebody, I had somebody bring up, would any of this have been possible without Diet Coke? Like, if you took. If Diet Coke didn't exist, could. Could this entire story have existed? And I think you could make an argument that absolutely not.

Absolutely not.

That's a good place to end.

Well, that's the story of Truth Social. The truth about Truth Social. Hope you enjoyed it. Let's move on to some tweet reactions, but first I need to tell you about Citadel Security. Citadel securities is the leading global market maker committed to creating the most efficient and transparent markets. They provide liquidity across a diverse range of financial instruments, including equities, options and fixed income, ensuring traders and investors can execute orders seamlessly at the best possible prices. Leveraging cutting edge technology and quantitative strategies, they optimize trade executions for tighter spreads and improved market efficiency. Whether you're an institutional investor or a startup building a retail brokerage, Citadel securities consistently delivers unmatched performance in an industry where speed and accuracy are paramount. Discover how they're shaping the future of finance by making markets more accessible and efficient@citadelsecurities.com that's citadelsecurities.com. now back to the show. Did you see that? Is it Bowery farming failed?

Yeah.

Yoni writes, it really sucks that Bowery farming failed. I always was rooting for Bowery because it felt like it could actually make a difference on nutrition and climate change. Here's why. From my outsider's perspective, that it was so hard growing a single crop that's both undifferentiated to consumers and low margin lettuce is cheap. Sold through wholesale Wall of lettuce at Whole Foods means it's even worse for margins. They scaled super quickly. Building and flying the plane at once doesn't work in the physical world like it does in software. While owning the local operations and needing to be good at lots of complex things simultaneously tons of capex that they paid for themselves. If you inverted each of those factors, you'd wind up with a multi crop full basket sold directly to consumers. Basically a CSA operated as a franchise. Interesting. I hope this won't dissuade others from trying to innovate and transform our food system. It's a worthy effort. Yeah. I remember seeing vertical farming stuff and never, never dug in too much.

But good, good take from Yoni as as usual. I think the real question that comes away from it is what was the actual strategy? Right. Because I've had the product, it's a good product. I remember buyer buying Bowery lettuce and being like this is good lettuce.

Yeah.

But I never, you know, I don't shop for groceries.

So it was Bowery branded.

Yeah. So they were like fully verticalized. You could go into Whole Foods and like buy their lettuce.

Sure.

That they had cultivated using their technology and eventually sold. But you have to wonder like. Yeah, what's the strategy? It's like the lowest possible margin product. It's deeply, deeply competitive. It's really difficult to sort of like differentiate because if I wanted to start competing with Bowery, I could go get a small plot of land and just obsess over making lettuce and create like the same quality of product which with a much different cost structure. And so yeah, it's one of those things like how would you have, you know, you obviously couldn't value a farm that was producing at Bowery scale at $2 billion. Right. I don't know. A lot of sort of mid level, mid market farm operations that are valued. So it's like you have to wonder, they were last valued at $2 billion. What was were they pitching at the time? Hey, we're creating this technology stack that other farms can use. And Yoni and Slows like have a big thesis around verticalization which is like if you have this technology, don't just sell the technology or the software, like sell the end product. But that's interesting. You know, they were involved with a company that, they were involved with a company that made Software for parking garages. And the software company just ended up buying one of the largest parking garage management companies so that they could own more of the value chain, basically. And so I would have loved to see Bowery's last pitch deck of being like, why are we worth $2 billion selling lettuce? Right. Because you have to imagine the, the actual net revenue on selling that lettuce. Like if, if somebody was running like a farm, you know, let's say somebody's running a vineyard and they're like, yeah, like we spent like 3 billion or we spent like $3 million last year to do 1 million of revenue. You'd be like, okay, like, yeah, bad, cool, like pet project.

Do you think they should have gone up market? Have you seen that Omakase strawberry company? That would be $50 a strawberry or something.

Yeah. So I'm excited. Starting with.

That seems very interesting because like it's so high end, it's going to be only consumed by like celebrities and like very. It's gonna be very Instagrammed. But you're also gonna have so much breadth to like tell your story. Whereas if you're just. If like, yeah, there's this cool story where the lettuce was vertically farmed but then it just comes in a standard lettuce. Still tastes like lettuce, still tastes like lettuce. Whereas the Omakase strawberry, you open it up, it's like a, it feels.

Yeah.

Sugarfish, right?

Yeah. I think that, that, that is what they absolutely should have done. I think there's a bunch of interesting angles to do, like exotic fruits that are almost like desserts. And so if they were the key thing though for Bowery would be like, how do you justify charging four to five to ten times as much for the same product? Which is what this.

I got a box of Asian pears once from someone and they were so juicy that I kept choking on them. I would take a bite and it would just explode with like, like coughing.

Like, oh my God, you guys gotta try this.

It was amazing. They were so good. And it's something where I'm sure they were like, you know, 10 times the price.

Yeah. But you have to like to make something like this work. Where Bowery's investing what I'm sure amounted to hundreds of millions of dollars in R and D and facilities. All this capex, you have to be able to tell a story of, oh, we're going to be able to, we're going to be able to expand, you know, our core product from a 20% gross margin product to a 90 gross margin food product. And yeah, I just, I, I, I.

It's also interesting because there's, there's like some other competitors that don't feel like they should be competitors, but they are. I'm thinking of like Rainmaker flooding different areas, like terraforming. It's like, yeah, maybe we're running out of farmland so we need to go vertical in cities or we need to turn the desert into farmland.

Yeah.

And if we do that, it's like, okay, well all of a sudden the price of farming lettuce is going to go way down if we can just figure out how to get water there. There's another plan to reroute the Colorado river if we switched California to nuclear powered desalination. So, so California gets the water from the ocean, desalinates it, uses that for Californian farmland and then the Colorado river goes through Nevada to New Mexico and Arizona and all of a sudden Nevada and Arizona.

Yeah, that's one of my favorite talks at Con. Yeah. I think what's interesting, where I'd end with Bowery is that this was one of the last, maybe is one of the last super high profile failures from the D2C era because Bowery was a company that the big branding agencies like the Red Antlers, I believe. I don't remember if it was Gin Lane or Red Antler that did it, but I think it was at a time where you could take any sort of product, slap a, get Emmett from Gin Lane or Antler to give you this half a million dollar brand treatment and then people are like, oh, this is investable now. Right. Like people investing in allbirds because it had a cool story and narrative and visuals. But then, oh, at the end of the day you're selling shoes.

Yep. Do you see this? Martin Shkreli tweet, defend capitalism everywhere, every time, be willing to die for it. Civilization collapses without it. And then this is something we could.

Frame and put on the wall. And then it says like Thomas Jefferson. And then Martin Shreli.

I love this because like the first reply is civilization actually collapses. Well, when it lacks strong sovereign institutions, social cohesion and resilience to external threats. And Martin just says, no mogged.

Strong opinion, strongly held.

Yeah, yeah.

No, I just think not enough people are saying this and I think it's now becoming a normal view within our hyper online technology world. But outside of, you know, my little brother, I've had to talk with him in the last year being like, no, capital capitalism is actually good. It's like if you look at all these different categories, whether it be education or health care or housing capitalism, life expectancy capitalism is the driving force that enables improvement in those areas. So ultimately you have to imagine that it's fairly good. So it's one of those things that feels obvious but like, I actually think is worth talking about because they're, they're. We were. Our generation was the generation that grew up where it was okay to be in the classroom. And a kid I remember in college would be like, consumption is bad. And it's sort of this decelerationist view that leads to Western Europe, which I like to vacation in, but I certainly don't want to live there, don't want to invest there.

Yeah, it's interesting. Capitalism for a long time faced like assaults on both sides. There was like the communism, like, we need to go back to, you know, like, real communism has never been tried. We need to go back to like, you know, Soviet era communism or something like that. But then there was also like the accelerationist, like techno version of anti capitalism, which was like, we're going to get AI and robots and UBI and. Are you familiar with Falk, fully automated luxury communism? This idea that. Yeah, there's like a bunch of sci fi stories about this also like, like political philosophers about it. And that one actually makes kind of a decent amount of sense. Although there's all these questions about like, how incentives would work in that case. But, but, but that did take hold in a lot of Bay Area people where they were like, well, yeah, maybe if we can just have the robots do everything, we'll live in the time of abundance and so there won't need to be, you know, we won't need to allocate resources because we'll have unlimited of everything and you can just snap your fingers. Although there's always a question about like.

Okay, well, what Luxury communists? Communism.

Luxury communism.

It is a good Communism needs a rebrand.

Yeah, it is a good, it is a good take. And it's certainly preferable to, you know, terrible communism or something. But, but then there's still a question about like, okay, well, there's only so much beachfront property. Even if you create like the Metaverse or you go to other worlds, certain.

Things will always be scary.

Yeah, it's very hard to imagine a world where it's like, oh, yeah, I can just like get an island in the middle of the ocean on demand. Like, okay, maybe you have some sort of crazy, crazy like micro robots that can just do that. But it's like, it's very odd. So the Sean Frank, good friend of the pod, says Virgin Run Club versus Chad Walk Enjoyer. And the Virgin Run Club says, you.

Got to give some credit to Willmanitis for being an early major proponent of the Chad Walk enjoyer where he was the Lindy Walk. The Lindy Walk, yeah. He would, you know, frequently tweet that he was going on a 30 mile walk around Manhattan and, you know, shortly after that had a nine figure exit.

So he actually said, the last time I was in Manhattan, I walked the entire island, like, from like, I don't know, 91st street down to the Wall street and back. And it was amazing. Like, you, you spend like two or three hours walking, I mean, particularly in Manhattan, because the entire city like, like turns over and you watch people leave work and then start settling in, getting dinner, and then the nightclub time lapse. It's insane. It's like one of the most fantastic cities in the world. Also, are you. Are you aware of how a lot of, like, the best bodybuilders are doing cardio these days?

That's all we're walking.

It's all walking. Yeah.

Oh, okay.

I forget. Chris Williamson was doing a video with somebody he's called like C. Bum. Chris Bumstead. You know this guy? So he is a fantastic bodybuilder. His cardio is 45 minutes of walking on an incline treadmill.

Yeah.

And it's amazing. I've been doing it because there's never an excuse where you're like, oh, I don't really want to sprint right now. But everyone can get on a treadmill and just start walking. And then 45 minutes in, you're like, okay, I actually burned a lot of calories. I'm actually exhausted. There's a lot to this because it's inclined, but it's very hard to stop.

We bought our house specifically because it's the best walking in Malibu.

Really?

Right. There's like this amazing walk path.

Fantastic. Sagar good friend says 12 days until clocks. This is actually an old tweet, but it's relevant because we just went through daylight savings time. 12 days until clocks shift forward, dooming the productive class to dark mornings for months. Also, people can drink outside one hour later. Team Standard time. So I guess we're actually in standard time now. We went back. So he's excited now that we're back on standard time.

Contrarian. To be excited about the.

Yeah, but he hates going to daylight savings time because then if you wake up early, it's dark. Yeah, but I And I agree with this. Like, I think the switch is always like super disruptive, especially if kids and a family, like, it just throws everything off. Like, yeah, you do so much to train the kid to go to sleep at a certain time. Their circadian rhythm.

Yeah. Our four month old, it's awful, is now deciding. He went from, she went from waking up at 7:10am to now 6:10 on the dot. And it's like, okay.

But I will say, like last week when we were at the tail end of daylight savings time, I got into the office at like 5 or 6 and it was perfectly dark outside and I could watch all the buildings in downtown like light up and like, oh, it's just beautiful watching the sun. Like there's nothing like watching the sunrise from the top of, like from the office. From the top of like when I worked at Bain Capital, I would get in before everyone and I would go around like set up conference rooms. I was like an intern and I would always be on the top floor of this building right as the sun rose. And it was like so inspiring seeing.

The sun rise over your ThinkPad. Amazing is an out of body experience.

Literally over your, over your Polycom. This was like 2012 or 2010. Every single office had a Polycom. It was great. Other stuff too. I. Okay, so Goblin says, wait, what the hell? I asked Claude if he noticed any patterns in my aura. Data data versus the health data I've been logging. And he's like, my summary. Oh sure, your, your HRV heart rate drops greater than 20% from baseline A day or two before the migraine starts. If it gets below 40, you can be pretty sure one's coming. And then there's a community note that says this seems to have been a hallucination as per the author, but it's like some sort of like deeper truth.

I think what's interesting here is like greater health comes from greater understanding of yourself and the various inputs that drive your health. Whether that's, oh, I feel a lot better at 5pm and I have more energy at 5pm because I walked in the morning.

Yeah.

And so this sort of quantifier self movement has been allowing people to understand themselves better. Whether that's getting your biomarkers tested with function or you're using your aura ring or things like that. And I just think like incredible, incredible things are going to come from having more quantifiable data and then having effectively a team of brilliant longevity and performance doctors that can analyze that data for free. The thing that we keep coming Back to about what's actually interested. Interesting about AI today is intelligence as a service. And so if you want to work with the leading longevity specialists in the world, a lot of them charge like 150k per year just to be in their sort of program. And it's going to be really incredible when the average person with their $10 a month oura ring can get even better care from this team of digital specialists than some public company CEO that's using David Sinclair's longevity program or whatever.

Yeah, yeah, it does seem valuable. I think for certain people. They need an algorithm or a doctor to tell them something or they need the quantified self data to tell them something. But I always worry that there is a loss of value in not just being in tune with yourself. Like the sleep tracking is fine, it's good. Sleep's really important. If tracking it helps you get more sleep, that's great. But you should be able to just ask yourself, are you sleepy?

Yeah. There's a company that's building smart AI toilets to analyze your urine and your feces called Throne. And they're bringing the quantified self to your toilet basically. So it's like understanding yourself through your waist.

I could see some of that being being valuable because that's a little bit harder to tell than just like, did I get a good night's rest?

We'll get it, we'll get it set up in the studio.

Okay, perfect.

You can be like, every time I have a really good bowel movement, the next pod I have to mess with. Banger.

Yeah, Banger. It's great. So Alexander says bachelors in the 1950s and he posts a. What's a screenshot from a book or a picture from a book? Men were also pressured into acceptable family roles since the lack of a suitable wife could mean the loss of a job or promotion for a middle class man. Bachelors were categorized as immature, infantile, infantile, narcissistic, deviant, or even pathological. Family advice expert Paul Landis argued, except for the sixth sick, the badly crippled, the deformed, the emotionally warped and the mentally defective, almost everyone has an opportunity to marry.

I thought this was relevant. I was going to ask you does it certainly resonated? Yeah. Do you think that people started treating you differently once you had kids because there's just a certain sense of responsibility? Yeah, just responsibility. When somebody is working for more than just themselves and has like more on the line that comes from a family. Like I do think there's this sense of, there is a sense of like serious. Like you bring a new sense of seriousness to your work that I don't think you can have. I think I looked at this and somebody. It's fairly easy to have a pretty good life if you are just a bachelor and you're living in your luxury apartment in New York and you have a job and whatever and you can do your run club and all this other stuff. And life gets infinitely more challenging once you have children in the mix and other sort of people that you're responsible for. So I think that I wanted to cover this because I think we'll actually come. We're going to see a shift back where, you know, Keith Rabois was in the news recently for saying you shouldn't hire anybody over 30. But I could imagine they're getting to a point where the tech world starts looking at people that are, you know, that are 40 without children and being like, yeah, like I don't know, like if you know.

Well, I mean, when I got to Silicon Valley in 2012, there was a blog post by PG and he said that it would be hard for a founder to be married with kids. And it was somewhat controversial, but it felt pretty consensus at the time, like a lot of people agreed. And I think that's maybe true for first companies. But if you're already like, like I've never had a job that wasn't an entrepreneur. So yeah, it's like, it's kind of just like the career of the entrepreneur is, is a little bit more. There's less of like a leap. Like I don't feel like, oh, if I'm gonna start a new company, I'm gonna like lose this stable corporate job. Cause that's not a thing that exists. What's interesting about this is that I feel like it's resonating and got so many likes because it's part of this like very trad revival. Like, let's go back to the way things were. Right. But, but I. Other than that example with pg, it's hard for me to remember like when I was 20, what were the 35 year olds or the 40 year olds saying about starting families?

Yeah.

Because I think that it was out of vogue and now it's kind of back in vogue.

Yeah. And I just think there's this always this oscillation between two extremes. And it almost feels like right now we're in a healthy middle ground where everybody's like, yeah, kids are a ton of work. Having a family is a ton of work. It is a distraction from product finding. Product market fit. But there's this like more of like a middle ground where you have a good example of is like ASAI Isaiah from Valor has like a bunch of kids. Right. And, and like you could argue that he will be more successful because he has like a small army that's depending on him to perform. Yeah, yeah.

It's certainly cannot fail. Yeah. And I do think there's probably something. I mean I remember when I like first made like a significant amount of money talking to my father in law about this, I was like, well I made like so much money I could like retire now. And he's like, no you can't. He's like, you don't understand how expensive kids are. You know, you don't understand like how much money you actually as a car.

Guy, I think of it in the, I think every time I see like a buddy with like a. I have a friend who's like 31 and he's got like six cars that could be considered supercars and I just look at that and as I'm like for every one child you could basically support two supercars. So I'm like, I'd probably be doing the same thing.

Yeah, it's great. Let's go to Vittorio. Vittorio says who even uses teams and posts a screenshot of Microsoft Teams vs Slack Daily Active users and teams is like absolutely ripping and slack is more or less flatlining. And I mean I think the answer is like normies. Like everyone who uses Outlook and just a normal job, they show up and the computer's just there and they're not on some slick MacBook working from a coffee shop. They just go to work, they have a badge, they sit at a cubicle and their boss says this is your tech stack.

Here you go. Yeah, this is a, this is a very startup tweet. This is a warning to all the technology brothers that are thinking about their product in the context of oh, we're going to build a Slack integration. Right. Because so much of enterprise software just ties back to communication. Slack, email. Email being like the bedrock of all, all software products. I think that, yeah. I remember I once built an internal tool to track how much time people were spending online on Slack because it's a really good proxy.

Sure.

For how much time somebody is spending at their laptop and so never got to building teams because it wasn't relevant to me. But I think that is, it's the building for the teams market that's going to justify your unicorn valuation. Not surely the Slack.

There is something interesting about teams Versus Slack, which is that with the recent defense tech boom, being a company that has to use teams because of Itar is like a little bit of a status symbol. And people founders flex about it because they're like, oh, I know that Slack. I'm a product guy. I know that Slack is a better product. I hate using teams. So I can, like, complain about this publicly and everyone will know that, like, my work is so important.

I have to be.

I can't use Slack because Itarch.

I was on a team's call for deterrence this morning.

Yep. And you probably felt great.

Yeah, the other. Yeah, I felt like Patriot.

Yeah, exactly.

Now, the other thing with this chart is what would it have looked like if Salesforce hadn't?

Oh, yeah. I mean, that's the other thing is that it's just bundled into distribution, so. Yeah.

But also, Stewart was running Slack. You imagine he would. That chart would still be going founder mode. Yeah.

Yeah. Tough. Daniel says we need to double the fluoride in the water and add Ozempic and Adderall too. This is insane. 72,000 likes. What a banger. This guy is just like a God tier. Post it. Yeah, it's just like we were talking about this 72. That's so many likes. Almost speaks to something.

Most. Most people have a Tweet that gets 72,000 impressions and they're like, oh, I'm gonna retire.

Yeah, exactly. This guy, he doesn't need to raise money anymore for his company. He can just fund it off the creator payout.

Yeah, he's good.

Generational wealth coming to him.

Yeah. For him, the balance is making sure that his. His MRR grows faster than Twitter payouts.

No, no, no, no. Just grow the creator payouts. We'll see at a.

Subsidized. Yeah, subsidized.

Let's see.

Christie's AI for Cops product. No, I think.

But you're. So you're anti fluoride.

Anti fluoride. But in general, I think there's a much bigger debate to be had around fluoride. And fluoride usually gets talked about this at Hereticon, but usually gets all of the shade, when in reality it's the fact that a lot of the pipes in the US Water infrastructure are lead based. And so that's just channeling lead into every household. And fluoride makes lead more bioavailable. So when you're. When you're having fluoride alongside lead, you're just absorbing more of it, which could. Could account for the. You know, what are what, you know, iq downsides of fluoride consumption. But yeah, I think if the United States was really a serious country, we would be thinking about more proactively about Medicaid. The population through the water for free. Yeah, it's like the world's perfect delivery mechanism. Everybody drinks water, so if you want somebody to be on a certain substance, then put it in the water.

This is genius because like this tweet could have just said like, oh, zempic is so amazing. We should put it in the water. Like that's just a phrase that people say when something like a miracle cure, but he wound up like having the most incendiary thing possible, double the fluoride, but then also adding Ozempic and Adderall. There's a ton of latch onto.

There's a lot of countries that have stopped fluoridating the water. In the United States, we.

It's.

It's regulated effectively, but every single year, we're effectively deciding to continue medicating the population through the fluoride in the water.

Wow, look at this. 17 likes. This is an undiscovered gem. Waleed says tons of young girls are using Chat GPT to manifest. Looks like OpenAI is acknowledging it on their official TikTok. So I guess ChatGPT is reposting the ChatGPT TikTok account is reposting this and people are using. I don't actually know that much about manifestation. This is the. The secret, right? Where you just. Yeah, I will be wealthy. I will be at Amman.

No, you don't say, I will be at Christie's. You don't say I will be. You say, I am at a mom. I am wealthy. Right? Present.

Present tense.

No, but this is, this, this is relevant because this is the bull case for open AI, right? They're not saying, you know, people on Tick Tock are using Claude to manage to manifest.

Right.

They're using Chat GPT. It's the name brand. It is.

It's the Kleenex for AI.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, the Kleenex.

It is, it is. It's just like ask someone on the street, how do you do? How do you use AI to do your homework? Chatgpt.com.

Yeah, yeah. It's almost like Google for search where like if that plays out within AI. It's just like when I want AI, I go to. To OpenAI.com chatgpt.

I mean, Sundar was correct when he said competition is only a click away. And yet Google has a massive monopoly. Why? It's just the place that you go, yeah, it's the default. I do think that there's something very interesting about AI for these kind of squishier use cases like astrology, manifesting, personality tests, that type of stuff. Because the hallucinations are fine with code. There's a right answer. So it can test itself. So it's very good at that. But then it's always, it's always tough in the middle. But when you get out into just like the. Are you familiar with the P.T. barnum effect? This whole thing. So the Barum effect is this series of like statements that I can make about you that feel very personalized but actually apply to everyone. So I can say like you have a complicated history with your family and who doesn't? But you're like, oh my God, you know me. Or like you believe you deserve more in life. Something like that. And you'll be like, oh my God, I do. And so a lot of like tarot card readers, palm readers, psychics, they use that PT Barnum effect. But AI can use that very effectively. And it can feel like, wow, the AI really knows me. Even though it's maybe just hallucinating or applying like heuristics that are basically apply to everyone, but everyone just wants to hear a pump up speech. And that's valuable.

Yeah. And this. And if that trend is real, there's a really big business. There's $100 million business to be built on just being AI for manifestation. Wrappers, rapper for sure.

Although it might get, it might get baked into one of the existing companies like Costar could. Could integrate something totally.

But I think these products are so engaging.

Yep.

That they can stand on their own. You can stand, you can spin it up and it can stand on its own.

Probably not super venture backable. Probably not a 10 billion dollar company, but phenomenal business if you get it right. I firmly agree. This is. This was one of the pitches when I went on my first million. I was like, exploit the Barnum effect, create an AI app wrapper.

Yep.

I don't even know how to pronounce this. To your taxes. To your taxes. Says an incredible thread on Musk. Very rarely I see something like this from someone who is not a blind fanboy. Tldr. Some people are larger than life. Then the self reinforcing, ugly pettiness of it. You wrongly assume this is a triviality to brush aside. They can do it for real. And it's a quote tweet of somebody from Olivia that says if you can't model Leviathans walking through the world, you're going to make some pretty bad mistakes. And it's just a deep analysis of musk. It's interesting. I've always liked the take that elon is both P.T. barnum, the circusman, the showman, and he's also Thomas Edison, the inventor, and he's solid on both and that really breaks people's brains because they want to latch on to just one. It's like, yeah, he does announce products before they're ready and he is wrong on those. But then he's also a great engineer, great manager, and can build real stuff, like the. Like the cars drive the rockets land. And so even if he's saying some. Some wild stuff that might be wrong in the short term, it's like, yeah, both are true. What was your take from this, though?

It's hard because I actually think there's like, yeah, million takes. But, yeah, I think. I think what you take away from this is that he's incredibly complicated and the people that just want to pin him as doing, like, the cringe stuff where he's, like, jumping on, like, the stage and, oh, he's not just an engineer, he's not just a poster. There's so much more. There's so much depth to it all. And yet the thing that we had, we had a listener comment on a. On one of our posts this morning saying that basically, like, very bearish about X and your take, which I think is the right take, is Elon has a history of just making stuff work and making money. So at this point in his career, betting against him is just like, generally stupid, stupid idea.

Yeah, it's interesting. Ali Taylor says. I'm somewhat embarrassed to admit it, but I genuinely find ChatGPT to be helpful and supportive when I'm anxious.

This is back to another wrapper opportunity. Yeah, I would be. There's probably already $50 million of ARR worth of these sort of like, ChatGPT therapy products that are just out there printing and they're not in. They're not even being talked about because it's just like two engineers just shipping.

I mean, the first version of this was like all the Riz apps. Did you see these?

Yeah.

Yeah. So I talked to a kid. Kid.

Yeah, I think I met that guy too.

DM me and was like, hey, I'm building this, like, ChatGPT wrapper for, you know, how to talk to girls on dating apps. So you copy what they said and it'll recommend what you should say. And. And I was like, that sounds great, kid. Like, Good job building something that people want. Clearly. Like you have some users like just go monetize it right now. Because the whole ChatGPT wrapper thing is going to be a bad meme. Don't bother with status symbols in Silicon Valley and trying to raise money. And he comes back to me like a month later, he's like, we're just doing a million a month.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I think he ended up joining if we're, if we're talking about the same people he ended up joining HF0.

Yeah, there you go.

And now he's building a self improvement sort of community platform product.

But that, but that initial, that initial experience of being young and making money is so valuable and, and then, and then taking someone who can a build a product, get it to market, figure out the marketing, like do the, I think he does the growth hack on, on TikTok. Like the motion of like getting the stripe account growing even if it rugs and like, oh, you got killed by ChatGPT. If you're a 20 year old and you're making a million dollars even for just one month and then you make nothing, it's like it's gonna be so much easier to stand back and find your go read 0 to 1, figure out what actually a monopoly business is. But you have the experience of launching, building, coding, hiring, firing, all these different things and then you can go build the real generational company but you actually have something under your back instead of just being like, oh, I went to school pattern match.

So when you go into your if when you have the right idea and you can go in and you could be like, yeah, when I was 21, I built a million dollar AR chat GPT.

Show me a high school diploma and a striper account with me for a.

Period of time it was like, oh, he traded sneakers on ebay. And then it was like, oh, he created like a Shopify store. Now he created, he or she created a thin wrapper on GPT. And if you didn't do that, like, like it's kind of bearish. So word of advice to the younger technology brothers, both male and female in the audience, go make a million dollars with a thin ChatGPT wrapper.

Don't fall for the PSYOP that VCs are putting upon young founders that you have to build a generational company that has a monopoly thesis. Like immediately, like if you're young, just go build something cool.

Yeah.

Air Katakana says actually insane how Steve Jobs was the singular successful ideas guy in the entire History of tech companies until 7.3k. Likes clearly resonated. I don't know how true this is. It's such a weird thing, like, who's an idea guy?

Why ideas guy? Ideas guy is a great term. Funny way to slander somebody, because among certain groups, being able to generate great ideas is like the highest. It's like the highest status thing, especially.

In the AI era.

And in many ways, like, you could totally make a case that Elon is an ideas guy. Right. He thinks of really big ideas and then he brings together smart groups of people to go and do that. And yeah, he's adding fuel to the fire and pushing people and questioning everything and all that stuff. But at its core, he's an idea guy.

Yeah, for sure. And I mean, it's like, where is the line? Like, is Zuck an ideas guy? It seems like he has the most value. He creates there is ideas, Right. And it's more like Will almost like he's in founder mode. So, like, he didn't have the idea for the Metaverse or the idea for VR, but he had the will to be like, we're actually going to go do 10 billion of capex on this or AI or something.

Anybody that's using calling, saying idea guy as a way to slander somebody is usually the kind of person that is mad because they see an idea and they're like, oh, that's a good idea. Like, I thought of that. Yeah.

But I didn't do anything.

But I didn't do it.

Yeah. So it's not just having the ideas, it's actually being able to, like, believe in them early. Like, there's plenty of ideas that I've had that I've seen the incarnation of a few years later and been like, wow, that's like a really. That. That was a good idea. But there's a massive difference between having the idea and actually taking action on it and going and going. Even just betting on the market. There's been so many times where I've been like, oh, yeah, Like, I do feel like Nvidia is, like, way underpriced right now and bought like a thousand dollars. I'm like, let's go. I should have sized that, like, way differently. One year.

One year of college tuition.

Yeah, exactly. I should have sized that way differently. Like, having conviction in your ideas is just as important. And I think that's what. That's why Steve Jobs is successful, because he has the idea that, you know, you don't need a keyboard on a phone, but then he Screams at anyone who says we have to have a keyboard and demands that it doesn't have a keyboard to a thousand employees that are all have like little subtle soft power realms. And there's a designer over here who has a bunch of friends and you can't fire them and they're gonna push back and like there's gonna be all these things. So it's like actually bringing the will of like the founder mode to make.

Your ideas actually and getting, and being lucky with the timing. There's a, there's a Justin, Mara's brother Nick, one of you know, the other co founder of Kettle and Fire. He has a new company that is disrupting the legacy CPG testing companies. And when I saw the deck, I was like, this is like super obvious. Like wanted to invest, would invest in anything he does, but saw it, I was like, yeah, this is super obvious. I'm sorry. Surprised nobody had really taken this on, but I'm sure a lot of other people had the idea. But Nick and his co founders came together at a very specific moment in time when there was a bunch of new regulations happening in the baby product market and new testing requirements. And so it created this sort of perfect moment to build Light Labs which will now probably end up being a really massive company. And a bunch of other people will look at it five years, years from now and be like, oh, I could have thought of that.

Let's go to the squirrel story. I know we don't talk about politics, but this is, this is animals. It seems to have broken through. So the Associated Press writes an orphaned squirrel who became a social media star was euthanized after being seized from home. And Mike Solana quote tweets it with say his name. This wasn't even the biggest Mike Solana banger about this. He, he, he quote tweeted another video of like, yeah, this one. He quote tweeted a video breaking down the squirrel. It was like all the best clips of the squirrel and it just says this is what they took from you. The Elon quote got 150 million views. That's like everyone on X, right? Yeah, yeah. Like every single person saw this.

Every, this meme was just a good way for posters to cash in. Yeah, because like Pat, Pat Blumenthal, yeah, was like sent me one and he sent two and one of them got like 11,000 likes or something. Like something ridiculous. But I think, I think the real story is that the squirrel was a content to commerce play for this guy's only fans. And so having the squirrel become A hero of the conservative of movement.

Very odd.

Is a bit shaky ground to build on because if you look, if you dig below the surface at all, it's onlyfans odd funnel. Yeah.

Many, many content plays are many. Instagrams are just fronts for success, fronts for only fans. Are you familiar with Gelman amnesia? I think we've talked about this. So Gelman amnesia is this idea that like, let's say you're like the world expert in structured credit and you pick up like the Wall Street Journal and they write an article about what you're a world expert in and they get some facts wrong. Then all of a sudden when you read an article in the same newspaper that isn't about your expertise, you're like, well, if they got my thing wrong, maybe they're getting the thing that I don't know about wrong. It's kind of like the glass shattering and you realize like, oh, there's all this, like, things aren't just broken in my world, they're broken everywhere.

Yeah, it was like my dad reading an article about me in the New York Times Times. You know, it's like, oh, wait, maybe this isn't like the, you know, bastion of truth.

Exactly, exactly. And so I feel like this was a huge Gel man amnesia moment for a lot of normies who just like animals because they're like, if the government could mess this up, like, aside from all the laws, aside from whatever happened, just the idea of like euthanizing an Internet famous furry animal is like comms nightmare 101.

Right?

Like, you should never do that ever, because they have virality and cuteness and that's like all you need. So you know that there's going to be a backlash, you should know. And so, and so if, if the government can mess up that, then maybe they can mess up the war in the Middle east or, or the Vietnam War. And so it's very easy to look at this and then realize be like.

Oh, the government can.

And that's Elon's point. Government overreach in action. And it's like, it's such a minor thing and it's like, yeah, I, I don't want to squirrel. This is never going to happen to me. But it's like, if they can get this that wrong, maybe they can get something else bigger wrong that does affect you. And I've talked to a lot of people in defense. I've seen this at the FDA where it's like a lot of the defense people are like, well, I went really deep dealing with the dod. And I saw how broken that was and I wound up starting the company. But that led me to believe that it's not just the DOD that's broken in their procurement. It's also the State Department, the Department of Agriculture, and all of these different agencies that all have like similar levels of rot.

Yeah. Like Boeing, Boeing, you know, has their issues with their planes, but they're also selling like 150k, like soap dispensers.

Yep, yep.

You know, to the government.

Yeah. It's very hard to be like, oh yeah, we are excellent. Everything. But just the one problem you're hearing about usually, like, where there's smoke, there's fire. It was funny because I was watching this video of this cute squirrel videos I was watching with my 3 year old and he was just, just dying laughing. Just like, so cute. Just like, oh my God, look at the squirrel. And I'm like crying because I know how it ends. And it was just like, I was like, oh my God, this poor squirrel, like I'm like tearing up and he's just like dying laughing because he just thinks it's like a cute squirrel. And I was like, damn. Like, yeah, when it, bro, when you find out, you're going to be like the most hardcore libertarian ever. But I'm not going to tell you. Podcast in 10 years and you can figure out what happened to the squirrel. But wild. Oh yeah. Here's the soap dispenser story. So praying for exits. Good buddy says post a screenshot of an article about Boeing, says Boeing cleaned up on Air Force parts, including soap dispensers marked up 8,000%. Wow. Yes. Good old government accountability. 150k for soap dispensers certainly seems correct to me.

So this is why I'm excited about. Do you know Kimia, the AI thing. Yeah. So our friend Kimia is building a company that allows anybody to find and bid on government contracts.

Yep.

And what's going to be really interesting about that is by introducing there's a lot of contracts out there that the government gives out that basically don't have much competition. If Boeing goes to them and they're like, we have these soap dispensers and we're Boeing and you buy a lot of stuff from us, so why not spend. These are great. Soap dispensers are only $100,000 per dispenser. Seem might seem like, fine, nobody gets fired for buying Boeing. But then if there was another bidder in the mix being like, I will sell you a soap dispenser. For 500.

Exactly.

And so Kimmy, Kimia is like arming the all the people, all the drop shippers. Yeah. Basically, like, basically everyone will just be on AliExpress. Yeah. So I. And this is talk to him about is like his company will be very successful if he can inspire a new generation of entrepreneurs that want to go and be government contractors. Because it's very tangible. Right. It's actually easier to go and make money selling to the government than it is to buy something on AliExpress, get it sent to you, mark it up, get the Facebook ad when you could just like product or service and customer. Product service and customer. Right. So I think predicting out the next couple years, Kimi is going to start a similar to what Shopify did.

Yeah.

New movement around government contract.

Are you familiar with the story of Transdigm?

No.

Oh man, it's fantastic. So it was profiled in this four episode limited podcast from Patrick o', Shaughnessy, host of Invest like the Best, a separate podcast called 50X. And it's a fantastic deep dive into this company. It was, it was like the least Silicon Valley company, private equity buy up, roll up and then it goes from like 500 million to 5 bill 5 billion to 50. There's like, there's like 50x of gain. And that's why it was profiled in the show. But the four episodes are like the CEO who, who like was running the company, then the lead investor in the private markets, then back to the CEO for a second interview about taking it public and what they did next, and then the lead investor in the public markets. So you get this like very back and forth. It's just fascinating. And the first time I listen to it, I was like, this is like the craziest jargon because you think you're like taking crazy pills because they're like, so what's your secret? He's like, well, we raise prices and we cut costs. And it's like. And he says, and they talk about this for like 20 minutes. And you're like, okay, get to like the crazy one trick that everyone hates that's so secretive and really it's just like super operational efficiency. Go in play.

Literally stuff that you can learn while getting a Harvard mba, which is raise prices and cut costs.

But Charlie Munger was asked about this on an Invest like the best episode. Like, what do you think of Transdigm? Like, would you ever invest in this company? And he was like, no, I think it's unethical. And the reason is because a lot of the way that TransDigm makes money is they, they go like, they, they make like all of the seat belts on planes. So you know, if you go on a Boeing or an Airbus that when you, you buckle your seatbelt, it's all the same clock, right? Yeah, they're doing the toilets. All the toilets are the same, all the seats are the same and all that stuff. Or they make like, you know, some sort of fan blade that goes in like every motor. And so what they'll do is they'll get intellectual property around that get a small monopoly on one single part. And then once they have a contract with the government, they'll raise the price so their margins are really good. And I don't think they ever get this egregious. But what they'll do is they'll say like, okay, yeah, like, like we sent you this part for like a dollar, it cost us 50 cents to make, but the next batch is going to be like 100 bucks. And the government's like, ah, 100 bucks, like, whatever. Like that's so little, it doesn't matter. But they're buying a lot. And then all of a sudden transdime starts making a lot of money. And so it's seen as like.

The issue is the government has budgets but no profit incentive. Nobody working in the government really has this sort of profit incentive.

Exactly. But it's fascinating. It's a very, very contentious company. Like some, some people love it, some people hate it. It's a fantastic financial story, but it's just like under discussed in my opinion.

Meanwhile, they're running See's Candy and they're like, we raise prices 7% every single year, no matter the market conditions or anything else.

Yeah, brand monopolies are okay, I guess.

Yeah, brand monopolies are fine.

Everyone has their preferred monopoly that they're like, this one's natural and the other ones aren't and all the other ones should be broken up. But my monopolies are good monopolies for me, but not for thee. Let's go to Jack Prescott. He says whatever happens after the earning call, the mission and focus will remain the same. Execute and deliver. Protect the West. Palantir.

Should we do a live reaction to the earnings?

Oh, did the earnings just happen today?

I think they were today, yeah.

I love Palantir. Fantastic company. Very interesting business.

Earnings per share beat 10%.

There we go.

No, no, I don't think that, I.

Don'T think it's actually, they're trading really well. They're, they're, they're trading like a tech stock now, which is fantastic. I think they broke 100 billion. I saw this insane chart that sham Sankar sent me. The. It was like every company in Defense, all the primes, their market cap and then their employees. And Palantir is like fourth by market cap and they have 3,000 employees and every other company has like over 100,000 employees.

Crazy.

It's remarkable. Like, do more with less.

The.

It's good stuff.

It's interesting. Google is not up to date. It should be probably on Perplexity. Let's actually compare this.

Just open the Bloomberg app.

Yeah. Need to pull up. We need to get a terminal on the desk.

Terminal right here. But.

But yeah, it's interesting that Yahoo is up to date. Interesting. And yet Perplexity is quite up to date. So congratulations to all Palantir shareholders. Palantir sales beat stock up 13%.

13%. Wow. So it must be over 100 billion now.

Yeah.

That's fantastic. I was at a defense tech event in D.C. and Shyam Sankar, the CFO who's been there since like day one, he might be a co founder, like first employee, he gave this great talk about Palantir and what they're building and, you know, how they want to work with startups and whatnot. And somebody asked this question, like, oh, well, you've. You've raised like, you know, $4 billion in the private markets and your revenue is only like $4 billion. So like, isn't this like a failure financially? And he was just like, oh, my God, like, you don't understand like the first thing about finance. The guy was from out of the country. He was from like France. Some like, backwater like that. And so the next question I asked, I raised my hand. I was like, so you've raised only. You've raised only $4 billion and yet your company's worth like more than 10 times that. Like, how do you make it look so easy?

Their PE ratio is 243.

Software. And they. And they have an amazing AI story, right. Because they have like all this private data that no one can get into. And so it's like they're going to be able to sell very differentiated products.

I think they're. I think there's. That's potentially a trillion dollar company.

I mean, Karp is just founder mode. Like he's the embodiment of it. And it's like, don't bet against that. Seriously. Steve Weissner says email marketing is dying. Google Ads are dying. Cold calls. Well, are dead. Not sure people Fully realize we're at a huge inflection point for marketing. Got to think differently about how to reach your customers. Customers.

So.

What?

Interesting. So what's interesting about this is that it feels like a lot of sales is all going to go back to relationships.

Sure.

And so the truly gifted salesperson that's just good at making people like them and wanting to do business with them is actually going to excel even in a world where as a small company you can have an army of like, like online digital clones that are just selling constantly. And it feels like people may only start responding to like a personal message of being like, hey, like the CEO of this company wants to meet you. Like, let me know if you're down for a conversation. And it's just like, sure.

Yeah.

So it's like going back to Senra's point and like core learning from studying the history's greatest entrepreneurs. Like relationships around the world. And in an era of AI that will become even more the case.

Yep. Yeah.

You can't disrupt the Chad that just like people like to do business with.

I think there's an interesting thing that this tweet misses, which is like a lot of these things companies have moved on to. Like, this doesn't even acknowledge like owned media going viral on TikTok, doing stunts, being really good at press. Like there are areas of marketing that still are like, they might die off in the next few years. But he didn't even really capture like the tail end of this marketing. But I agree with your point and.

It'S interesting because he's direct response marketing seems to be working better than ever. Like Meta is getting so optimized that I buy products on a weekly basis from companies I've never heard of because they serve me an ad for a highly relevant product and that still seems to work. And Meta's figuring out a way that even though CPMs have gone up dramatically, like the ads still work. Like, you can't brute force a stupid product into being really big like you could like a decade ago. But the ad platform is like getting better and better. But yeah, I think what this misses is like you are going to need to figure out how to get high quality attention for your product or your business. And there's. And you're not going to be reliant on this like, tool set that everybody has access to.

Yeah, I think people miss this with like the, the AI spam or like AI sales agents is like there's going to be an arms race. And just as fast as the AI spam increases like so will the AI filtering. It's that classic, like there's this web comic that's like, oh, this is amazing. This, this, this AI, I just type one bullet point and it turns into, it turns it into this like really long email. And then on the other side it's like, this AI is amazing. It turns this long email into just one bullet point. And it's like the relationships are built on just like text messages between two people that are just like, do you want to do this deal? Yes or no? It's like thumbs up and that's the end. So I'm very skeptical about like the spam being a good path.

Yeah.

Unless there's something like you really found some weird edge and you're just like, but it's gonna be short lived.

Yeah. The other thing that's cool is now that anybody can, anybody can be like a pretty competent developer.

Yeah.

I, a founder of my portfolio who's not the CTO of his company, like almost won a hackathon this last weekend just by using all of the publicly available tools. And so what's interesting to that is it's the really talented marketers of today going forward are going to be looking more like engineers. Where historically the really sophisticated marketing organizations, like Ramp as an example, they have a lot of engineering involvement in the marketing activities that they're doing. And so you have to imagine that the new marketers are not the best marketers are not going to be like the affiliate marketers or like I'm really good at AdSense because that's all just like automated now. It's like I'm actually writing code to better find and attract and do all, you know, customers.

Yeah. Yeah, that's very interesting. Like that boring business says, good times create high EBITDA multiples, High EBITDA multiples create bad times. Bad times create low EBITDA multiples, Low EBITDA multiples create good times.

So I think this is a funny tweet, but I have to say that I feel like it is great. Good CEOs create high EBITDA multiples, high EBITDA multiples create sloppy CEOs. Bad CEOs create low EBITDA multiples, and low EBITDA multiples create opportunities for good CEOs.

Yeah, it's kind of like the wartime versus peacetime CEO thing a little bit. I think that there's, I think what, what I mean, what needs to be like unpacked about the wartime CEO is just that there's like a million different wars that you can fight. There's like. There's like, the war of, like, my company is dying and I need to, like, fire people, cut costs, and just, like, keep this thing going.

Yep.

To, like, make it to the next fight. And that's what that. That you need a wartime CEO to get through that hard, hard time. But then you also need a wartime CEO to go back on the offensive.

Yep.

So there's like defensive wartime CEO, offensive wartime CEOs.

Yeah.

And they're both wartime CEOs.

Yeah. The good example right now is Sundar at Google spending the last 10 years.

Everyone says he's like the classic peacetime CEO.

Yeah. He's making so much money. Every employees making a lot of money. The shareholders are doing well. Everybody's just kind of coasting. And then it's like, boom, Sam Altman comes in and laps you on AI. All your AI products internally suck. Sam Altman. Everybody loves Sam Altman's products. Boom. You make room for the Perplexity Guy, which is becoming a legendary shitposter himself and has a very high extreme EBITDA multiple for his business today. And so, yeah, it's the relaxed CEOs creating opportunities for cracked CEOs.

Yep. I think that's right. Atlas says. Amazing. Now we have LinkedIn thread guy goon tropreneur influencers depicting an AIGF in front of the giant Goon Tower in Dubai, the goon capital of the world. We are still so early. And it's another one of these. We talked about this before. I created this AI influencer. In two minutes, it's making me $3,000 a month, and I only worked 60 minutes a day. Let me show you how to get started.

And of course, there's like, an entire economy of people selling courses on how to make your, like, army of.

Well, you know, that.

And I just want to see. I like if somebody's watching and. And they can send me their stripe dashboard showing that how much you're making. Influencer is actually making money. Like, I'll shut up. But until then, I'm just gonna keep calling this stuff out because, well, the.

Dashboard shows that the courses are selling.

You know, I love how this guy, too. His username is Creatine.

Creatine Cycle.

And I wonder with this quality of posting, I'm guessing he stopped stop cycling and he's just always, always on it.

Yeah, always on it. Well, you know that, like, when you join Andrew Tate's, like, you know, club to, you know, become like, a entrepreneur or whatever, he had, like, most. Most of like the fake guru, entrepreneur hustle. Core, core seller guys have like one thing. They're like, I'm the real estate guy. I get you in my funnel. I talk about how I became rich through real estate. And then you, you will eventually pay for my course or like my in person thing to learn how to do real estate. Or there's a different person that does it for crypto. Or there's a different person that does it for, you know, shopify sites or whatever. Andrew Tate does all of them.

Yeah.

He doesn't do just one. You go in and there's like eight modules and it's like, learn crypto. One of them is forex trading Forex another. And then, and then as soon as AI got big, he has an AI module. So you can become like an AI influencer. Like this guy might be like downstream of Tate in some ways.

That's crazy.

Fascinating.

Yeah, it's smart going multi product. Tate has so much attention and such a crazy funnel.

I'm sure that he understands the product shifts, but people are just buying the attitude and like the brand and it doesn't matter what the product is. You know, he can sell anything. It's wild.

Yeah.

Let's look at Cody Norquist. He said he traded in his Tesla. Zero regrets. He bought a extremely depreciating Range Rover that will probably be worth half as much in six months.

Yeah, I just, I don't know if this guy's in tech, but I do think that this is the beginning of a trend where tech people discover luxury products and they're like, wow, these are actually pretty nice. I never, well, I never even thought of going to a non Tesla dealership. You know, I tried my friend's Range Rover and wow, this actually feels like pretty good. You know, it's like, you know those tests that they do in cars where they like, like touch all the buttons and plastic and stuff like that and there's something about. Yeah, like you can't. Like I. My driver, the guy that I used to get to and from the airport, he. I had to tell him like, don't pick me up in a Tesla because he has a Tesla and he has like a, just like a regular like black car or whatever and being in the Tesla one, everything feels like cheap and kind of wonky and I just don't like it. The acceleration is the other thing. But yeah, I just don't. It's just not a luxury product and I don't want to be in them. And so now that not only are there other like electric products out there, but this like sort of prevailing narrative that maybe gas cars aren't that bad. And I just think that if this trend continues to play out, it'll be good for San Francisco because people aren't going to want to get that. It's really expensive to replace a Range Rover window that's been shattered by somebody that's breaking into your car. You know, you can just eat it. It's like.

Yeah, I do think that one of the most like underrated near term bull cases for Tesla is just actually filling out the product portfolio. Totally. There's no reason why they can't do like a Mercedes S Class A supercar which they've been talking about. But even just taking a Model S and being like everything has like wood and, and like, and like real metals and stuff like, and yeah, it costs twice as much. Yeah, it's luxurious.

They don't have a minivan, they don't.

Have a minivan, they don't have a station wagon, they don't have a convertible. Currently they don't have a full size suv. Like they're just like missing a bunch of pieces. But then also within the range, you know, like Mercedes has done a great job having like the S Class, the E class, the A Class and the S Class. Like it feels different when you're inside. Like, like even the leather stitching is different than an A Class. And that's not that hard to do. It just hasn't been a priority because the whole thing has been economies of scale. Economies of scale around the batteries, around the acceleration, the self driving. But if you get to a point where you can buy something and it's like, okay, yeah, I'm getting the, the model, the Model X, but with the upgraded package that takes it to Range Rover level of luxury, like it's game over. Because it's going to be so much safer than a Range Rover when you're driving with the self driving and stuff like, but you're just not gonna, unless you, unless you have a driver who's better than NASA driving, but I don't know.

And that will be good for the whole Tesla brand if there are products that genuinely feel like luxury.

Everyone's been talking about, oh, they need to go down market to like the $25,000 car. But maybe they actually need it. They're already basically there. Cause you can buy a depreciated Model 3 for around 25, but what you can't buy is a Tesla that has the luxury features of like a Rolls Royce and they're and lucid air kind of came in as like the top upper market, but they could just crush lucid with like a slight tweak to the interior.

And if Tesla built a $400,000 car, it would buy it. Amazing.

People would buy it.

It would be, yeah, it would start displacing. I'm sure that has a much bigger market than the Purosangue, right?

Totally, totally. And I think the, I think the design language is evolving. Like the 3s, X, Y, like those all have like very neutral, unoffensive looks. The cybertruck's in the exact opposite direction. But the cybertruck showed me that they could build something that's like as iconic as a Huracan design or something like that. And so if they can bring some of that to like, what does, what does, you know, Tesla's edgy next generation design language look in a luxury sedan or a full size SUV like Escalade. I think they had a timeless design and they've ridden it so long now that even with the electric, the new electric metric Escalate is, I think 180K. Tesla should get in there and be right at 180K. But see, okay, when you, when you run the company like Elon does, you can probably put even more crazy stuff in there. Right, because you can get into like, like, you know, operational efficiency around how he's acquiring like the wood and tell a story there. There's probably something really interesting that could happen.

Yeah.

Anyway, let's move on to David Holes, founder of Mid Journey Love. This guy played a Starcraft with six friends last night. It was a free for all. We added two AIs to fill out the eight player map. We spent the whole game fighting each other while the AI slowly took over and suddenly were too powerful and beat us all. A lesson in AI safety.

I think this is a great example. It also I used to play Starcraft.

Oh really?

Quite a bit. And I was diamond ranked and like pretty good. So I would usually smoke the bots, but I have some distinct memories where you're just like, oh my God, I just got steamrolled by like you, you think that you're like winning basically and you're just on one side of the map and then just like this like comes towards you and that could be like what we're doing right now, which we're like, oh, look at like the cute LLM and like, oh, I just generated this funny picture of like a squirrel. Me.

Yeah.

And then you just get steamrolled by the AI?

Yeah. I wonder what AIs he was using. Just, like, in game AIs or something third party.

Well, every video game has their. Of course they've had, like, their AI.

But those AIs I believe, have never. Maybe they cheat or something. But there was the story with OpenAI. They had the Dota team, and then they did a Starcraft thing as well where they were able to beat the, like, the world champions. And. And for that, I think they had a specific restriction where they interacted with the game via an API, but they still limited the actions per minute, so they couldn't just get inhuman reactions. And then also the API lets you see beyond the fog, and they obviously wouldn't do that because it's cheating. So they nerf the AI. They kind of level the playing field, but the AI still wins. And so you kind of should expect the AI to win if you're going to, like. No, no, no chess master expects to beat an AI at chess.

But yeah, it really makes it. It is the re. It's like, kind of. It's great because it's a meme, but at the same time, it. It makes the case for these AI doomers that are like, guys, we need to stop fighting among ourselves, and it needs to be more of, like, the humans versus AI. Like, we need to take this seriously. And that was more convincing than any, like, essay that I. I've seen from them.

Totally.

Which are really easy to be like, like, cool story, bro.

Yeah, I. I mean, David just has great takes on all this stuff. Like, he's. He is pretty, like, AGI pilled and. But he has, like, very nuanced takes. He's not just, like, out there, like, saber rattling and, like, having a conniption fit every two seconds. Why did you. Why did you select Joshua Steinman? We are. Good morning. We are going to win.

Okay. Simple.

This is not a new tweet every single day.

Tweets it every single day.

Yeah.

Not even a particular banger. Some of them ended up. Some of them. It's funny watching, like, the algo. Some of them do well more than others. But the reason I included it is that I see these, like, every three, four days. And every time I see it, I'm like, nice. So anyways, I just included it because it's American.

Thank you for your service.

And I do think it's a public service and it's. And it's kind of an example of, like, marketers that think, like, oh, like, we're being too repetitive with this messaging where Now I just associate Steinman with winning and being committed to winning and it makes me want to back whatever he does and being optimistic. Right. I mean, and it's.

Yeah, yeah, he worked in the Trump administration, is very pro Trump and, and never faltered when the polls weren't going his way. Like, yeah, it's like he's, he's a big fan also. I mean it's his version of like the jocko willing thing. He posted this at 6:16am and as we know, the most important thing is not waking up early, it's getting on Twitter and posting first thing, get on X post. This is key. Will Menitis says having a full time Bible instructor is the new private jet.

Yeah. And pressed. No, I think. Was it? No. Preston quote tweeted Theo about something else. But no, I think this is relevant because we know some people with full time Bible instructors, some billionaires with full time Bible instructors, and it just shows that even a product like the Bible that is available to everybody and been analyzed, you know, over and over and over and over for generations, it's still worth hiring, you know, a tutor and learning even if you have the time to study it intensely.

So yeah, there's also an interesting thing where like, even if you're the most like atheist skeptic about the Bible, it's a valuable text just because it's so old that it's been copied again and again and again in so many different stories like the Lion King or whatever. So the first thing a child learns, the first story that a child learns is like a hero's journey that's derived from the Bible. And so if you can go to the source text, understand like the way the story and the narrative is structured, that gives you power in storytelling and also understanding what resonates.

Oh, and our mutual friend who is a Bible instructor to the global elite, his main point is that if you don't understand the Bible, you're gonna miss so many other things. When you're reading some random story like the Lion King, it's like, oh, well.

Like, yeah, it does just improve, like, you know, your edification and your enjoyment of other literature. So yeah, get the full time Bible instructor. Although, I don't know, maybe with AI it'll be on demand soon. Some of those Bible apps like Print money. Yeah, like, it's a good business. There's a few. And then there's that company, Angel Studios, one of the most underrated media companies that does really well.

Really?

Yeah. Christian, like they, they did an adaptation of the Bible that was Like HBO level cinematography and, and did really well and they produced a number of, of films that are all like related to Christian themes and, but more interestingly, like the business has just become very, very good.

Yeah.

And they've done, done, they've done very.

Well and they're interesting tickets business to try to monetize. There's a podcast called the Bible Project that I listen to that's totally free. They don't do ads, but it's donation based which is like, at what point should they just become a church?

Sure.

Right. An online church, effectively.

That's cool. Just pay what you want. Yeah. Power tools are making a comeback. Julian Fried Freed says the power tool renaissance is underappreciated. It's a great time to be alive. If you are someone who likes making things and quote tweets.

This is, this is. I shared this because it's funny because tech guys whose only tools has been a phone and a laptop are now discovering that there's the democratization of super high quality power tools has been happening like in the background. And there's like entire religions oriented around the different brands of power tools. And whether you're like a Makita guy.

Or Milwaukee guy, I've seen those memes that are like choose.

And the guys that have their drills like fight each other, like attach two of them and they just like.

So I haven't gone down the power tool, like, you know, rabbit hole and watched a thousand hours of some YouTube.

I feel like I got to like Tim Ferriss pilled where Tim's like mindset was like if, if something. If you can hire, if you make $500 an hour and you can hire somebody to do, do the job for a hundred dollars an hour. Nick Huber now when I'm doing stuff, yeah. Nick Huber's like, why would you stand on a ladder? And it's like, it's, it's a good point. Now when I'm doing like, if I do something around the house and I do like, yeah, glory. Household glory. I find that I think women are attracted. You know, when I, when I can like use a hammer. Sarah's like, nice.

I remember one of my first dates with my now wife, like went over to her sister's place, changed a light bulb. Everyone was like, this guy's God. Yeah. It was amazing.

Marry this man.

Yeah, fantastic. I got my power tool game. I need, I need to build up.

We're going to get some. I think we should space on the wall.

Tom Morello from Rage against the machine posts 25 years ago today, the Battle of Los Angeles, the COVID art for that album that has Bulls on Parade and a couple other really hit songs. And Orin McIntyre, quote, tweets and says you have the same political beliefs as BlackRock and Citibank.

I think he was trying to dunk on him. But your point of view is that.

I love Rage against the Machine and I love blackrock and Citibank.

There you go.

So what a match made in heaven.

I'm glad.

Welcome to the club, Tom. If you have the same. If you have the same political beliefs as BlackRock, you're a friend of mine. It's great. Yeah. It is kind of odd that people try and dunk on this. Like, like, I do think it's a.

Good way to get people to question their beliefs.

Yeah.

Because if somebody thinks that organizations like BlackRock and Citibank are inherently bad and then you tell them they have the same set of beliefs as that group, then it is a good, at least thought starter in their mind to be like, maybe I should have a more open mind around certain things.

This is also one of those interesting tweets where like, I can't quite tell if this is a leftist or rightist critique. Like, it could be like, you believe you like Citibank and they like, like ESG and dei, so you suck and I. And like, you should be more right wing or it should be like you like the capitalist BlackRock and Citibank. You should be more left wing. Yeah. And it's like, I don't really know, but all I know is black.

Basically. It kind of makes sense. Like raging against like blackrock is the machine. Right. So it's saying like, if you're. You're raging against the machine yet. Yeah.

You shouldn't be aligned with the machine yet.

You're aligned with the. You're stimulated. The machine. Yeah.

But who knows? Maybe BlackRock and Citibank are raging as the machine. The machine of stagnation.

Yeah.

The machine of under naturalization.

BlackRock created Burning man, which is exactly. It is the foundation on which Burning man was built. Yeah.

The machine of a lack of financial products. I wouldn't want to live in that world, be a disaster.

How long, how long until we got viral for being the podcast bros that love capital. No, no, that say that BlackRock created BlackRock City.

Eventually we'll get there.

It's going to happen.

There's, there's like a cottage industry of, of YouTubers that just put out endless, like hit pieces on BlackRock being like, did you know, that they own everything and they don't understand how like fund of funds or ETFs work. It's so hilarious. And you watch someone fall into that trap and you're just like, oh my God, take one economics class, please. It's really bad. Anyway, Colin Mickels says. I hope I'm pronouncing that correct. Michaels maybe. Colin Michaels. Few learn that SpaceX prices their launches way higher than it costs them to launch. They're essentially reaping 30 to 60 million dollars in profit each launch. Blue Origin existing is extremely good for the commercial space market. Bezos is notorious for downward price pressure. And then he has to follow it up with an apology. Kind of. I underestimated how many people would misinterpret this tweet. Lol. I don't know what they were misinterpreting. It seems pretty basic, but I mean, everyone knows that SpaceX is like way ahead of Blue Origin. But you know, competition is good and if you like going to space, I mean, it is for losers, so wouldn't want to be.

We'll get to that later in the.

Pod as a SpaceX bull. You know, maybe you don't want to encourage thing. I do, I do love when these. The Musk Bezos rivalry in some ways is just so entertaining because they have, they have warring properties like everywhere, right?

Yeah.

They both have car companies because Bezos was like one of the biggest backers of Rivian.

And then.

And then they have rival space companies. Obviously everyone knows about that one. SpaceX and Blue Origin, they also have rival media efforts because Bezos owns the Washington Post and.

Wait, but the way that you just said all this and it kind of makes it seem that Elon is mogging Bezos at literally every single one of these Washington Tesla, you know, Commerce.

Commerce.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it's. I don't care about, I don't. I mean, it's because I care about. I care about what Bezos is doing with his money now. And if you're repeatedly getting mogged.

Yeah.

Wow. You have to imagine though, that his performance across all those things is going to improve as his testosterone levels have climbed month over month for the past five years.

It seems like it's happening in the Washington Post. A lot of changes. There seems a, like, like he's improving. That maybe Blue Origin, you know, becomes a big space launch provider.

Yeah, but it's. Yeah, I think that would be amazing for humanity. I think Rivian's holding up Olivia Rodrigo or whatever name is.

There's there's another one too. But yeah, I mean, I, I, I think Bezos is a little bit more of like an old school, like, mega billionaire where he sees the side projects very much as like side projects where it's like, like get somebody to do something, go and show up.

Like, he's not on the factory floor at Rivian.

Yeah. Elon feels like when he does something, it's like he's putting his life on the line for it. And it's like almost you. A lot of people, this is a critique will say, like, well, like, I actually just care about the space thing. I would be fine with him not spending time on media. But Elon's like, I'm going to personally make this change the way this company works significantly. I'm going to go and rename it. I'm going to do all this crazy stuff. And for Elon, it's like, yeah, he only has one boat. Elon doesn't like Angel Invest.

Renaming. Yeah, renaming. Twitter has. The decision has grown on me quite a bit. When it happened, it was like one of my favorite brands. Even though it was flawed and it was very painful. Like for years I would just input, I guess not that long, but I'd still put twitter.com and more and more it's feeling like, yeah, coming in and making it, it just making it your thing actually makes sense in the context of Elon.

Yeah. There's that saying, like, like when there's a change of leadership, the company needs to be refounded.

Yeah.

And that's certainly what Elon did.

Yeah.

Even changing the name, change all the people, change everything. So that it's like. But he had to do it because as we talked about with the truth social thing, like having a network is very, is, is very important and it's very resilient. And even, even if the servers did go down, which was like a big FUD thing for a while, like, people would have opened up that app. That's where they go, like, yeah. And it's very hard to get people to move, even though people tried to move to Blue Sky.

We should do a deep dive on threads and how that's actually working.

Yeah, it is, but it's very different.

Yeah, it's working. Totally different.

Market subculture, completely separate product.

Yeah.

But yeah. Cheers to. Cheers to both Elon and Bezos. I love you guys. Another Steinman tweet. Gotta love it. 100k views. It's a quote tweet from Arma, who posts a picture of the reception desk at General Motors Technical center in 1965 Interior by architect Eero Saarinen.

And it's crazy because you looks like a 90s sci fi. Totally super heavily of its total. And they were probably the 90s sci fi movie was just referencing them.

General Motors because they had the, they had the technologists, they had the money. So they just went and sent it and I'm sure it was like the most delightful place to work. If you were an engineer, you were like, this is beautiful. Inspires me. I want to go build great stuff there. Yeah, it's fantastic. So Steinman says Detroit was fire back in the day. Then politicians decided shipping jobs to China was more important than the American industrial base. Making it political, bro. We don't talk about politics on the show.

Not on this podcast. But we'll hire.

We will, we will, we will. Love some great aesthetics.

Yeah. I'm really excited for this new generation of hard tech and defense tech.

They're going to do stuff like this.

For sure they're going to do stuff like, for sure we're going to do this at deterrence right now.

It's messy, like, you know, sleeping on the floor of the warehouse. But it will be beautiful. And there are some companies.

I forget if it's Airbnb, like when, when Lockheed Rooms Robotics company.

Oh yeah.

It will have like a robot playing a symphony in the entryway.

Yep.

Like, beautiful. They're welcome to use this idea. Just throw some shares to technology brothers.

Yes, yes, yes. There is. There is a company that made I. I feel like I read it in a hit piece. Is like, oh, they spent too much money on this. But they, they built a full replica of the Dr. Strangelove. How I learned to love the atom bomb. There's this Stanley Kubrick film and there's this iconic, huge boardroom where all of the military leaders are meeting as this massive, massive board.

Yeah.

That's huge. 50 people is the closest, like built.

A replica of it is the closest example to this like the scale AI office. I haven't been. But isn't it pretty iconic?

I've been. It's. I, I don't know if I've been to the newest one. It was beautiful, but it didn't like the thing of it stand like this stands out. Stands out. No, it's just like, it's just like, it's hard to differentiate because like, there is some practicality like, like this, this, this like entryway desk is like the most impractical thing. There's so much like wasted space here. But that's exactly the point, I love.

How the woman is sitting like on an island basically in a bowl. It's fantastic. And it's like you can't get within five feet or whatever.

No, yeah, it's, it's great. So yeah, making like bold design decisions like that, that are they go against the obvious optimization of like square footage. Like it is going to cost you more to do this, but it's going to make a statement and it's going to be more important to the long term.

Maximalism.

Yeah. Red Bull Futurist writes, I want a dozen kids.

This guy's awesome. He's a rocket scientist or an emerging rocket scientist. I think he's involved with SpaceX also.

Caffeine connoisseur.

Caffeine connoisseur. Excel enthusiast.

Fantastic.

Yeah, I think this is hilarious. I pulled this out because 10 years ago he would have been ostracized for saying something like this. It would have just been so random. But the pro natalist movement is now becoming the new norm, at least within the tech community. And I think it's great because I hope Red Bull Futurist goes and has 12 children because they're all going to be a bunch of smart little rocket scientists and we'll probably create the companies that topple SpaceX and Blue Origin Monopoly on space.

Yeah. I mean the trick is just like breaking free of the memetics around like what it takes to have a dozen kids. Like yeah, you probably need to live on a ranch outside of a major city. Probably not raising a dozen kids in Manhattan unless you're a truck. But if you're willing to go live in some interesting place and you know, set your life up to be, oh, there's a couple other families there with lots of kids and we homeschool or something or we do something interesting and like, you know, we've designed our life with that being the KPI that's the priority. Well then it becomes very easy. Everything flows from that.

Yeah.

So shout out Red Bull Futurist. High Yield Harry. Great fintech influencer writes, oh, you just ran the NYC marathon. That's sick, dude. I just, just spent all day building an investment memorandum that no one is going to read.

So I feel like High Yield Harry and some of the other folks from his generation of posters, like basically it almost, it's, it's like they there, it seems like there's infinite competition now from these sort of new posters.

Sure.

And yet these guys are like pretty stable. Like they've got like, they're like posting, you know, regiment and, you know, it seems like they've kind of broken above the noise where you see a post from a high yield Harry now. And you know that it means something.

Yep.

You know, it's not just. It's not just a shitpost.

It's a little threshold, though. I feel like if you write an investment memo, someone should read it. Come on, man.

Yeah, but I think it's more. I think he's more saying, you know, look, when I write a memorandum, people put in size, they're not worried about what it says. They know I wouldn't write it if it wasn't worth.

They just see the attachment and they wire. They don't need to open it.

Yeah. They go straight for the wire.

Okay, I like this. This is a little bit more optimistic than what I was thinking. It was very, like, low level analyst coded where it's like, I'm doing kind of make work and this sucks. That's how I read it at first.

But I like your interpretation more. I gotta. I gotta go long. Hairy.

I love it.

Early. Early Finn.

That's great. Mostly just anything to avoid watching the New York City Marathon. I was on the phone with somebody yesterday. They were like, oh, call me after. I got to watch the marathon, and I picked up the phone and I was like, I'm gonna keep it real with you. Watching a marathon sounds like the most boring thing I could possibly imagine. I'm not. I'm already not that into sports.

The only way that you should be watching a marathon is if you're betting on significant others in it. You're betting on it or you're running in it.

Yeah, exactly.

The best way to watch a marathon is by running in.

To be fair to my buddy, I did. I. He did have a friend in it, and he was, like, cheering the friend on and stuff.

Yeah, well, even. Even. No. A friend watching your friend. It's like if you're watching a friend run a marathon, like, it better be like some, like, blood, like, relative connection. And even then it's cringe. But even look at the Spanish when they go to a bull run. They're not just watching, they're running. They're running with the bulls. Right?

Yeah.

So let's bring bull runs back.

Bull run. Yeah. Replace the New York City Marathon with bull run.

Or just put a bull into the marathon.

For sure. For sure. Yeah. New York City talk talks this big game. Oh, we have Wall street bull. We're all into bulls. Prove it. Bull on the street. Turn it loose. Turn it loose today. Turn it loose. Now I want, I want a New York City bull run.

Let the marathon go. Give them a one minute head start.

One minute. And then release the bulls. Yeah. No slackers.

Yeah. Not just one bowl. Like ten. Yeah, ten.

You better be running six.

Make every person running the marathon wear red.

Yes. Yes. That's great. Yeah, no slack. We need to step up the expectations of the NYC marathon. Let's do it. Another Palantir. Another Palantir tweet. Little bit more of a shit post. I like this one though. But you know, it's good because the other one didn't have the badge. So it was just a fan. Like a stock. A guy who owns the stock. This says the employee badge. So Eliano Yunus says with a lot of Palantir merch. Now, out in the wild. Here are some ground rules to follow when sporting the logo. No drugs, no fighting, no theft. No more than two beverages. No elliptical. No kipping pull ups.

Why? Why is he singling out kipping?

Oh, because it's a CrossFit thing.

Sorry, I was thinking. Yeah, yeah, that's really good. I thought, I was thinking muscle ups because thing I only do muscle ups.

Yeah, of course. Strict, strict muscle up.

Strict muscle ups. No, no, you know, sort of like. Yeah, yeah, yeah. For doing your reason that this is relevant is like when a company crosses a hundred billion dollars in market cap, does it become a religion? Because like, yeah, he's kind of acting as like a priest of saying like this is good and right and this is wrong.

It is.

I think it's a good.

Yeah, I mean it is legitimately valuable to be like, you know, this merch is out in the world. We want to like set a tone for like what it means to have this. And you know, some of this is a joke, but some of this is very real. And so I like that he's like enforcing a brand standard like a little bit more broadly and hopefully people got the message. If I see someone doing kipping pull ups in a Palantir shirt, it's over. I'm going to show them this tweet. Like, I printed this out.

Printed it out.

I printed it out.

Let's each keep a copy in our wallet.

Yeah, exactly. For when we run into somebody from Palantir. I mean Palantir. Fantastic team. I from some random content thing. I got a DM from a kid who just like graduated from some school and went to Palantir and it was like still a cut above. It's a 20 year old company. Like you just don't See that anywhere else. It's wild simp for Satoshi. I am Ginger Trash says by the way, polymarket will become a way to short startups post election. The financial primitive is finally here. Yeah.

And I think what's, what's interesting about this is that, you know, having the news around Bowery today is like, okay, this is $2 billion company that was. That's now as of whatever this last week worth zero. The thing that. So I really hope this becomes true because it'll provide a lot of content for us and then we'll be putting some size on the platform for sure. The interesting thing though is that the private markets effectively have legalized insider trading already. Right. All the private markets are. Is like using inside knowledge on companies, teams, founders and placing bets accordingly. And so what will be extremely chaotic about this is that bring short pressure. If this actually happens, companies will have to be like employees. You are legally not allowed to trade the company polymarket because like it'll be like that. You'll see so much activity of like, right. Leading up to a big product announcements like oh, $20 million just got placed on polymarket. Right. And so hopefully this doesn't lead to more like if this actually plays out, it'll be, it'll lead to a lot of pressure around the private. Yeah, yeah, we've just reinvented.

Yeah, we just reinvented stocks from first principles. Lmfao. Yeah. Yes. Well, you know how they do this for like so death pools are like illegal. You can't bet on someone dying because then you have this really perverse incentive to like go kill them obviously. But on polymarket there are a number of contracts that are like this person will still be the leader of, you know, Hamas by this date. And so it's like we, well, they could step down but really what you're betting on is like are they going to get taken out? And so there's a bunch of like, like, you know, you know, proxy stats that you could probably build to, to get there where you say like this company's domain will still be live or like this company where you're not like truly betting on just the stock going down, but it's like some proxy for them.

Yeah. The real, the cool thing would be the real meta stuff around Polymarket where like will Polymarket do 100 million in volume on this month in 20, 20, 25. Right. Because like you're, you're able to bet about the platform. On the platform and it's. If it's on chain and it's all like verifiable. But then there's also the incentive of like, okay, if I put a bunch of size into this into this bet, then I could just artificially create the volume.

What's interesting is that like there are already poly market markets that are direct representations of liquid financial markets. Like one of the most like popular categories that I see is like will Bitcoin hit 80k in December and it's. Or will Bitcoin hit 100k by the end of the year and it's like you could just buy bitcoin. Why are you betting on this in this weird way? But that's kind of an effective way to short bitcoin. I guess it's some sort of like proxy. It's not perfect. And so I could imagine this but for a lot of startups, like, like the liquidity is just not going to be there because there just aren't going to be that many people that care about some series A company that like.

Is got some VC platform teams have entire teams.

It would be funny if there was like a VC propping up their.

Their portfolios like poly market accounts.

Yeah. Yeah. The insider trading will be crazy. I It would be interesting to see a VC be like yep. We're pivoting to like long short.

Yeah.

Like we are a long short fund. Like and like like we will. We will be going long one company and we will be going short the other companies because we think our founders are going to win. And so we're. We're investing a $20 million Series A and we're putting $10 million on polymarket on shorting all the other companies. Crazy. We already did Bowery. Let's do Bazelord says how do we get a new elite in America? I think this one is broken. Seems like we're in the midst of a power shift. No technology trends to disrupt established hierarchies way more than then it cements them. I think we are. I don't Aimless post. Yeah. The new elite thing. I was talking to somebody about this how this is.

This is the story of Elon. Makes a bunch of money in tech.

Yep.

Starts owning everything. All the like these super important robo.

Taxi but doesn't just wind up laundering it through a bunch of nonprofits.

Yeah. And then buys the biggest. One of the biggest media companies in the world. A social media company.

Yeah.

That is the story.

Yeah. He's doing impact investing even though like some people might not like the impact that he's having. Like his. He's putting his wealth to work in, like, very specific target investor, essentially. Much more than, like, you know, oh, diffusing a billion dollars through a bunch of nonprofits that are kind of like, moving the.

Yeah, I saw someone else.

Plastic straws.

Yeah, I saw someone else say, like, because Elon, I guess, was like, helping bus people into Pennsylvania or whatever. And somebody was like, like, we have our George Soros. Yeah. And it's like. Yeah.

But I mean, the other thing that's underrated about, like, elites is, is when you. I think when people go back to, like, the. This idea of, like, we need better elites, we need the older elites. It's like back in the 17th century, 18th century, early 19th century, the elites were the ones who would go and build Hearst Castle, Versailles. They'd build these, like, massive houses, and then they would. And then they weren't just, like, perfect boxes of glass that were mimetic with everyone else, and they just wound up looking like track homes. They were like, these very unique expressions of wealth. And then when they. When they turned over, it didn't make sense for anyone else to maintain them, even the descendants. And so they became museums and libraries and. Yeah, and like, there's so many stories of this where.

Yeah, the Getty is that.

Yep, exactly like. Yeah, the Getty. The. What's the other one in Pasadena? I forget the Huntington. It was a house. The guy was so rich. He was a railroad baron, oil baron. He built train tracks that went to his house because he wanted to just be able to, oh, I want to take the train to New York.

This is. This is Elod Gill and his new Monument company.

New Monument company. This is Nat Friedman with his. With his, like, one off projects, the scrolls. These are dividends that get paid to society and. And pay back in probably better ways than most of the other things because they build the brand and founders want to work with them, and so they get better deal flow. So it actually is rational.

This guy go and message your favorite elite, which you can DM them on Twitter and just pat him on the back, say, thank you for.

For doing something good.

Doing the money good.

Interesting. Yeah. Something interesting that will live on beyond you. I mean, Bezos is doing that with the long now thing. The. I think that's what it's called. He's building this clock in this mountain that will. It'll keep time for like, a million years. And it's just like this really heroic. Yeah, it's just like this heroic engineering project. And it's something that, like, everyone right now is like, oh, the Project's not going well. Oh, it's not working. You know, it's like this massive mega project, but then it'll probably work. But in the next 20 years, you know, it just takes time and then.

It'Ll just be eternal time. If you want eternal time. Have a little patience.

Have a little patience. Skip that one. Men only want. Let's see. Dylan Morris says men only want one thing and it's disgusting. Who wants to split this with me? And it's on Biz Buy sell award winning sailboat manufacturing business in San Luis Obispo county. And it's going for 495k and it cash flows 75k and they build sailboats.

That's a tough.

Would you split that with him?

I'm not going halves on that. We talked about this last time. Buying a company with less than half a million of cash flow is a job. And this one, if you split it with a buddy, it's buying the minimum wage jobs. You could just work at Chipotle and then go and build sailboats for fun on the weekends. I think businesses like this, we need a movement around entrepreneurs and retiring boomer operators to be like, I'm hiring an apprentice to learn my trade and take over my business. And I will give it to you on a seller note over the next 15 years if you come in and operate it. Because like the only way that I could see this business even maybe being sellable is if a smart enterprising search funder out of Stanford goes and decides, I'm going to roll up all the mom and pop sailboat manufacturers.

Yeah.

And create a monopoly.

Or put a, put a gun on it and raise some defense tech money.

Yeah, let's go put a gun on it. No, I think slap a 50 cal on the front.

I actually know a guy who sailed sailboats all around like the. He would sail like all the way from California to Australia and he actually did have a 50 cal in the front because he was worried about pirates.

Smart.

And he would be able to like fire off warning shots if something happened. Because when you're out there alone, like anyone could just come up to you and what are you going to do? Call the cops? They'll be there in two days. Like that doesn't work.

Two days. The sos. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You're on your own.

Yeah, yeah. That's crazy. John Palmer says, I feel like joining the worldcoin team is kind of like the crypto dev equivalent of joining the Marines. People join there and you then you never hear from them again because they're just grinding strong men, create good times, etc. What do you think about Worldcoin? The eyeball scanner.

The eyeball scanner.

Very dystopian. But I'm. I'm always like, I'm just bullish on SAM projects and I'm interested to see like, kind of like the manifestation of that idea.

Yeah, you haven't. I feel like you don't hear. The other thing about it is like, I feel like a lot of World Coin activity is just happening overseas.

Sure.

So like these devs are like being deployed to Africa just like scanning eyeballs and like doing it more efficiently.

Yeah.

But yeah, I think I'm excited to like hear more about like. Yeah, it's so. It's so dystopian in a way. You would only do it if it was like you thought it was really important work.

I mean, it does feel like in line with Sam's idea of like, like, okay, in the future we need ubi. We need it to be a global ubi. It is truly the fully automated luxury communism concept of like, how do you distribute wealth to every single human individually? Like, well, you need something that's, you know, identifiable on a human basis and then has its own internal currency that can then be distributed and redistributed endlessly.

We should get a World Coin or.

I'm down.

World Coin can sponsor the orb.

I'm down. Antibiology says whenever something is PFAS free, non, non toxic as a, as a nonstick pan, it usually just means they replace the thing that we studied and we know is bad with something that is unstudied. So we don't know it's bad yet.

I love this guy. I. He's got a really cool company in the cancer research space, like reviving a bunch of lost sort of like esoteric knowledge around cancer and like bringing it back. So anyways, this guy's like brilliant building something really cool. I've gotten personally gotten some like great health tips from him via DMs.

He gives this example. Stainless steel, lowest aluminum possible, Corning glass, cookware, copper are all better if untreated. Cast iron kind of sketches me out because of the seasoning process. You just perma burn fat onto an oxidizable surface and even if the fat is non toxic, excess iron. So he goes on and yeah, it's an interesting thing. There's always this like rat race of like, let's get rid of one thing. Oh, we introduced a new bad thing. Like we got rid of lead and then we wound up with microplastics.

It's hard because so many things that are so many products of modern manufacturing processes and the things that we expect out of products end up being just deeply toxic by their very nature. And so it's really hard to shop for modern, any, any sort of consumer good now. Like you have to be hyper, you have to be hyper aware of it and, and even look like glass is superior to plastic in pretty much, I don't know, in pretty much every single way except for its weight and it's shattered and all the health concerns and all, you know, sort of like safety concerns. I mean. So yeah, I think, I think that there should be a deep tech company that tries to create like the issue is the consumer packaged goods entrepreneur that's like I want to make a microplastic free version of blank or I want to make a non toxic pan. They don't have time to do a 10 year sign experiment on creating a new material. We need more teams that are trying to create totally new materials that are non toxic that can be used for everyday consumer goods. So somebody out there wants to spend a decade developing new materials for consumer goods that are non toxic. We will, we will back you.

Molson Hart says if you get rich when you're young in America, you will live in a neighborhood that is 90% old people you cannot relate to at all, 8% young people with family money that you can't relate to and 2% with a fellow Ubermensch that you can break bread with. Same goes for, same goes for country clubs.

It's pretty funny, it's pretty accurate.

It's very true.

I think what's interesting is you have this, at least in my neighborhood, you have this balance of people that have moved into the neighborhood in the last five years and then people that are multi millionaires because they bought their house like 20 to 30 years ago. And the tension between those groups is crazy, right? Because like they just want very different things. And so. Yeah, but I think, I don't know, there's, there's a lot of alpha and just going and being in a place where you're the younger person with energy that's still in, in, in the trenches basically. Because all those other people just want to back what you do, basically.

Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. I, yeah, when I moved into my neighborhood I was like, we met our neighbors and I was like, oh, they're about the same age as us. And my wife was like, they're 15 years older than us.

No, this, this Happens, like, I don't know, with Sarah and, like, her mom groups. Like, the other mom in her group will be, like, 15. Yeah. 10 to 15 years older, and they're just like, yeah, there's, like, a pretty lifestyle. Yeah, well, same lifestyle, just totally different era. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, I think the lesson is, like. Is, like, that is not a criticism that, like, the nice thing is still the nice thing. And, yeah, you shouldn't be like, oh, okay, because everyone else who's, like, in my world, like, like, lives in, like, a high rise. Like, that's what I should do. It's like, no, it's okay to go be, like, the odd one out at the country club or the odd one out in your neighborhood. Like, that's fine. Just do it and meet the old people and it's fine.

Yeah. I think there's a lot of people that are in environments where they're the young person and they build their entire identity around that, and then they wake up one day and they're like, wait, like, I'm the older person in the room. And you actually always want to perpetually be the youngest person in the room, but then you go from. From the workplace to the neighborhood to, you know, and you want to, like, stay on that very American trajectory.

It's great. Number runner run. The Nums says ambition is just rage channeled, and Dan says, real af. You think that's accurate?

I don't rage. I don't. I feel like I've never gotten the feeling that Donald J. Trump is. Has internal rage. I think he more just, like, likes being, likes attention, and likes winning, and those are, like, the core motivations.

It's funny because there's, like, a book about him that's literally called, like, Fire and Fury, and it's, like, it makes the case that he's driven entirely by rage. Odd pick. I. If you wanted to pick someone who's, like, peaceful but extremely ambitious, I think you'd go for, like, a Zuck or, like, a Steve Jobs who, like, don't seem very, like, rageful. But I guess you hear stories, but.

I feel like you hear more stories about, like, I can think of that. That exchange that Zuckerberg had in the early Facebook days where somebody's like. Where he's like, yeah, these people just, like, give me the person's. They just give you all their data. And he's like, yeah, these fucking idiots. Like, trust me, for some reason.

Is that rage?

Is that rage?

I don't know.

But you don't hear stories of, like, Trump on like raging out at people. Right. Like he sort of gets. I don't see it as rage.

It's certainly like one. One path to ambition. Obviously we hear a lot of stories where people are like they've been wronged, they've been hurt. But I think people really like boiling this down to just like a single precursor. It's like you have to have a chip on your shoulder. Shoulder to do anything. You have to have rage. You have to be able to.

Josh Wolf.

You have to come from a broken home or something like that.

Chips on shoulders. Put chips in pockets.

And it's like. It's certainly true that there's some. But there are a bunch of exceptions there.

Yeah. I don't know.

It's a good one.

If you, if you have rage inside, at least use it to create value for shareholders.

Oh, this is a great one. I love this. Trivian says a friend was at a cafe in San Francisco and said Cursor crashed on his laptop. I like that he's just like saying this out loud I guess. And it says a cursor co founder was walking by at that very moment and offered to debug this company is sticking around. Is this an ad? Because this seems a little bit improv.

Cursor, crash.

Cursor crashed out loud and then just happened. I mean talk about a great marketing stunt. If this was like planned. I don't think it was. It seems ridiculous. It seems this is the type of thing that happens in cafes in San Francisco. Yeah.

You saw the other. There was something last week with a guy who was like in a SF like cafe with just like a thing on the other side of his laptop that's like marketplace startup have revenue raising pre seed say hi or whatever.

And it's like wait, really? So if you looked at his laptop.

Yeah, people were taking pictures of. There was like only nsf. But yeah. I just think there's a reason that like half of the super important companies in the world come out of that area and it's because they the density of like minded people and the overlap that you can have with customers on a day to day basis.

I remember when I lived in San Francisco I went to a cafe. I didn't work from cafes very often but I went to a cafe maybe just to get a coffee and I ran into David Holl's co founder at Leap Motion and I remember him just talking to me and I was like, oh, I love what you're working on. Like this is super interesting. And he was like breaking it down and yeah, it was like way back in the day when he was working on this, like, it was hand tracking for VR.

That was.

That was David's first company. Fascinating. That's just like the type of thing that happens. Serendipity. San Francisco is a serendipity magnet. David Zaganov says realizing the reason they call it hard tech is because this is really hard. Makes for a nice moat, though. And then Dylan just says, nah, bro, that's not why. And then he says, this is why. And I tweet, got cut off.

I like. I like this. I like this because. Because it reminds me of like two cattle ranchers being like, makes for a nice moat, though.

Yeah.

This cat raising cattle ain't easy, but pays the bill.

It's a life. It's a life.

So, yeah, I. Maybe we do a deep dive on why hard tech's called hard tech, but. But yeah, it definitely is real. It's sort of nominative. Nominative determinism. Shit's hard, you know?

Yeah, yeah, it makes sense. I mean, everything's just slower. Right. Like, you need a part that could delay you a week. There's just like a million things that could go wrong. Interacting with the physical world and then heavily heavy regulation.

Yeah.

So it's just like you have two really tough factors that you can't move at the speed of bits. You have to move at the speed of atoms.

And yeah, when things break, they physically break. Yeah, rough.

Rough. But I think the hard tech and hard is hard meme. I think I was around when I was in yc and I think it was probably true initially and then a psyop after a little bit. Not like an intentional one, but like a negative meme where there was a time when it ceased being hard because just the capital markets were ripping so much and technology had gotten better. And there were a bunch of ways to do hard tech adjacent things, whether it's white labeling or partnering or doing a bunch of different things. And that's when the first boom of hard tech started. And now we're all talking about it, but all the big companies are like 10 years old. So, like, clearly hard tech wasn't hard eight years ago when some of the big companies were getting started, but everyone.

Was repeating ultra hard tech companies. Cool. The interesting thing is like this new generation of hard tech companies. So I have portfolio company called Shinke, which uses robots to kill fish using traditional methodology that Japanese fishermen would do. And it's done in a way where they basically insert like a needle into the back of the fish's brain and it, and when you kill a fish that way, it doesn't, the fish doesn't release all this cortisol and other stress hormones that make the fish age more rapidly. And the interesting thing about that is they're going to a market with like very little innovation, not a lot of copies, competition, but then they're going to build this system that other people are going to realize, oh, that's a really good business. But then if you want to go compete with Shinke in five years, you're going to be going up against a company that can spend weight, that's still very young, that can spend way more money on R and D and sales and marketing and distribution and has better cost structure and all this stuff. And the real hard tech is going after like a 5 to 10 year old hard tech company that's competing in the same exact category as you, that has more resources, that has more learnings, that has more customer relationships and like. So that's the real, that's the hard, hard tech.

Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. Let's go to Ivan Zhao. Ciao. Ivan says, why do Americans always vote on Tuesdays? Because 1800 citizens needed a full day's horseback ride to reach polling sites after Sunday church. Pretty amazing that this democracy runs on horse and buggy software in the age of the Internet and AI. That's a very interesting thing. I didn't know that. Super Tuesday. Yeah, Every Tuesday, right? Because you need a full day. Wow.

A full day.

But you can't miss church.

I feel like what was your take?

He's the founder of notion, right?

Yeah. Yeah. I feel like if you rode a horse to a polling site today, you would end up in a very viral video with the poll. He's like breaking the horse. Just like it'd just be very dark. But no, I, I thought this was interesting because I, I hope that the Ivans of the world end up building software like, you know, more like out of the last week it seems like there's been a lot of failures on the software side in regards to, you know, polling and, and, and voting specifically. And so if the voting and polling software, the future looks more looks and feels more like notion. I think that'll be a win for democracy.

Is the digital polling ever coming? Like we're so far, we're just so deep in this. I feel like we never we. I'm so black belt on it. I feel like it'll never happen. It should be so simple. But then again I was reflecting on the Fact that maybe like 10 or 15 years ago there was this. There's all these stories about, oh, well, in Japan they're like this cashless society. They have this great NFC technology. You just take your phone, you can tap to pay, you can tap for your id, you can tap to get on the subway or whatever. It's just all digital and it's like, why can't we have that in America? Things are so backwards. But then like for the last month, I haven't carried anything other than my phone. And it's been fine because the DMV finally moved over. There's an app for it. You can just pull up your driver's license there. Every single place takes Apple Pay now. And so we finally have caught up. So maybe it'll happen with the digital voting. Probably not in the next election though.

Not the next election.

And then also all the skepticism about the integrity of elections. Like one party is going to fight it tooth and nail. Whoever's more pissed about the lacks of the election.

I really think it's boomers.

You think so? Boomers aren't into it.

I think boomers don't get enough hate in general. Yeah, like we need to be slandering.

Boomers more added to the list. Enemies.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, Add it to the list, Ben.

So Eliza says people shit on the YC ecosystem shilling to each other, but the underlying concept is actually beautiful. 20 to 30 something a year. 20 to 30 somethings. Founders buying sass from other 20 to 30 something year olds. We speak the same language, we run at the same speed, and it's really nice. This is for sure true. Love it.

Yeah, I think I, I think I pulled this out because I invested in Eliza's company and we, we promote. We shall.

For the.

We do promote companies that we hold securities in.

Yes.

But yeah, I think that's a beautiful, it's a beautiful thing. An entire economy that is dependent. Dependent on itself.

Also. I mean, like, people always say this about, like the YC hack is like, you get into YC, you start some SaaS company, sell all the other YC companies. Your revenue spikes and it's like, is it a good company or not? But I haven't heard about that many stories of like, oh yeah, that company, like their revenue totally collapsed because it was all fake, like YC revenue. Like, if you, if you're in YC and you can sell to. Yeah, if you can sell to Airbnb and Stripe and Coinbase, like, that's pretty durable revenue. And even if it's Just a bunch of startups. Like, there's enough that you could cobble together. Like, it's not like YC has ever had a situation where it's like, oh, all of the companies went out of business all of a sudden. Most of them are fine because they're.

In such diverse industries.

So diverse. Yeah. It's actually like a fairly diversified revenue stream. If you're selling to like all the YC companies, it's almost better than actually.

More like one of YC's like, like moats is that if you could be NYC and you don't go NYC and then somebody that's competing for your in your same category does.

Yep.

There the loyalty is like very real. Like they are going to use your competitor out of at least in the early days until like it's very clear who the best product is.

Yeah, yeah. We were talking about, like, if there was.

If somebody like the real. The only threat that we have with technology brothers is two other guys that look like us that are NYC, that take the 700k and then they just have all this alpha from being nyc.

Maybe we should go through yc. We talked about some company that was like highly, highly volatile. It might have been like a real estate company or something, but it's like all of their revenue came from something that was super cyclical. This happens with hiring companies a lot. They're doing great in a bull market. And then a. As soon as the rifts start and all the companies are laying off, their revenue just goes to zero because no one's hiring. So no one's paying for hiring platforms because there's just plenty of applications coming in when it's not a tight job market. And so that's an example of if you can have a diversified revenue stream amounts like, oh, yeah, well, the market overall is selling off and it's a little bit tighter. But there's still this one company that we sold to that's growing because they're in some interesting industry and they've kept us on as a client. You can actually be pretty. Pretty good.

Yeah.

Let's stay on YC. Let's go to Jared Friedman, partner at YC says, Today I learned Saudi Aramco was started at 225 Bush street in San Francisco because Ryan Peterson says every company in the world worth More than $1 trillion was founded on the west coast, including Saudi Aramco, which was started in the same building as Flexport here in San Francisco. That is crazy stat West Coast. All the innovation in California.

California, yeah. All the innovation in the world.

Maybe it flips at some point, but.

Yeah, I think, I think, I think Nikita elsewhere on X was making the point that it's because on the East Coast a lot of power and resources go towards like, prestige and people that have, you know, degrees where SF and California are more egalitarian, where if you're talented and hardworking, you can get resources and opportunity. Who knows? But I love it. And I think that we should, we, California should be more proud of founding Saudi Aramco. Yeah, it's very American.

It is.

I wish, I wish the state did a little like, you know, one on 10 into the Saudi Aramco precede. That would solve our budgetary issues right now.

Fantastic.

Nice cash flow.

Well, I mean, I, we, we should do a deep dive on the Saudi Aramco story because I'm pretty sure that was like the, the ownership of that company was like, fought with wars. Oh, yeah, yeah, I'm pretty sure, like, it was a big deal when it got like nationalized. It was not like a. It was not just like, oh, they decided to move over to a different country. It was like we. This oil's in our ground and it's ours. Eric Raymond says you can just make things. This is my massive white pill about the revolution and small scale manufacturing that's going on right now. The immediate trigger is a story I read about a guy who was annoyed that his wife needed a wheelchair. And the designs were all crappy and hideously expensive and made in China. So he booted up a small factory that now builds custom wheelchairs, delivering them for about a thousand dollars a pop, undercutting the Chinese by a factor of five. Amazing. This guy's gonna do one of the DOD contracts you mentioned. Like, really? No, I just imagine.

Yeah, if he can. Government contract.

Yeah. If he can spin up a small factory that builds custom wheelchairs for $1,000 a pop, like, he could go and get the Boeing contract that's selling a Soap dispenser for $150,000. And very. He clearly has the skill set to deliver a high quality product at value. So get this guy on that platform.

The original promise of 3D printing where people were like, oh, you're going to just be able to buy something online and 3D printed in your office or whatever. And like, I think that will basically come true. But it won't necessarily look like people imagined it. It'll just be localized manufacturing, talented small companies, etc.

Yeah. Let's go to Austin. Is it Reef? Austin Reef. Founder of Morning Brew Yeah. He says the New York Times Tech Guild went on strike today. As a reminder, here are their demands. A ban on scented products, unlimited break time. Pet bereavement, mandatory trigger warnings. When discussing events in the news, it's.

Funny because they were way ahead of. Does, does it have to be your pet or could it be a squirrel owned by someone else?

I need some time off for sure. This is, this is like such bait. Like, yeah, clearly, clearly their demands were more than just this, this. Come on. Like they're obviously good at.

He didn't.

He knows content.

He knows content.

He knows content. But yeah, it's very silly. But also the half of these things are like, you know, the read here is like, oh, they're all like left wing demands. Like they're like special snowflakes that need trigger warnings. But then also half of these are like, I could see the right wing adopting these because like, oh, the scented products have microplastics. So we can't have scented products anymore. Or like, yeah, we need to be reave our squirrels. So like I need time off. Yeah, I don't know, it's like a little bit of like a horseshoe.

The real, I guess the Perplexity CEO did a PR push today saying that he would happily replace all of their writers with AI. Like he did. He did a piece today.

He's just becoming a shit poster. Oh, wait. Oh, the New York Times. Oh yeah, because they're, they're in a battle. They're in a legal battle. New York Times and Perplexity, I'm pretty sure. Or maybe Wired or one of the big publications for the scraping and whatnot.

But, but it is kind of funny that the New York Times, they purposely chose to go on strike the day before the election as a way to.

Like, oh yeah, because the Tech Guild is so they do the software development and they do like the, the New York Times needle which will be getting like the most traffic tomorrow ever. Right? It's going to be like the highest demand. They do cool like visualizations. Some of the tech people are actually really awesome.

They know when they have some leverage and they're willing to twist the knife.

But yeah, I mean, I imagine they'd be able to give on that if they got a pay bump. Maybe this is a good one. Let's do Linus. So the creator of Linux, Kakashi says the creator of Linux has publicly voiced what I've been saying for the past two years. The Linux creator Linus Torvald, quote, AI is useless. It's 90% marketed while he ignores AI for now, it's all hype.

So the reason that this is easily refutable is that we've only ever recorded one podcast together in person. The fairy one. In every other episode of this podcast, AI Generated powered by Delphi.

It's funny because it's like the classic, like, programmer mistake of, like, marketing doesn't matter.

Yeah.

In my opinion. So it's like 90% is marketing. Let's talk about Nike. Is that a valuable company? Does that bring people joy? Is it valuable marketing? It's 90 marketing. Of course. And that's okay.

Yeah.

Some things are marketing driven and that's okay. It creates value and everyone is happy. The shareholders, the employees, the customers. Everyone's happy.

The athletes.

It's like, this is the myth of consensual capitalism. Like, oh, like I didn't consent. It's like, no one cares. No one cares that it's just marketing. Like, it's fine. But I get that he's saying at a deeper level, like, you know, we want more AI innovation. Like, it should be good. A lot of the products are kind of bad, but still.

Yeah, but you have to have to fundamentally believe this. You have to have. You have to believe that all the AI products that we're using are not AI products.

Sure.

Because the products, many of them are magic. Right. Like, they really feel like magic.

Let's go to the last one with AI, Sujit Indop says nobody. Blank Wall Street, Silicon Valley. What if a private credit bubble was combined with an AI bubble and then Nvidia related party transactions were thrown in just for fun. And he's talking about how I believe Nvidia is now doing deals.

Yeah. There's huge amounts of credit being extended that is backed by GPUs.

Sure.

His core, I think, complaint, from what I can tell, is that GPUs are very rapidly depreciating assets. It's one thing to extend credit against the house, which is relatively stable or, you know, an appreciating asset, but extending huge amounts of credit against GPUs is like, you know, would be like really levering up a car and then driving it a ton while the car. Cars were sort of like improving very rapidly. So much so that a car would be almost worthless after three years.

Yeah.

Whereas a car is going to have some value for 20 years, granted. As long as it doesn't sort of.

Well, the other, the other flip side here that I see people criticizing is this idea that like a startup will go and raise a $10 million Series A and go and get $90 million of Nvidia credits and then they'll announce $100 million fundraise that looks like, you know, an in kind related party transaction from Nvidia. They get $90 million more revenue because the, because the startup will use it. But it's kind of like, you know, where did the money was kind of created out of thin air.

Yeah.

I feel like the thing is that this also happened in the dot com bubble where a lot of the telecom providers were funding a lot of dot com startups and giving them like preferential access to bandwidth early on. But the thing is that AI is overrated in the short term and underrated in the long term. This could lead to a bubble that pops. But it still could be amazing that all this stuff gets built out and there's all this infrastructure. And that's exactly what happened in the dot com boom. There was a lot of document dark fiber and that's what enabled Google to grow so fast because even though the Internet bubble had collapsed, the, the infrastructure was there. So when the right product came along, it was able to go super wide super fast.

So I feel like Bill Gurley has a nose for bubbles. Like he just can smell bubbles and he's been harping on the, he's been harping on the Nvidia related party transaction thing for quite a while.

Yeah. Interesting. Let's move to audience Q and A. We have one question that we'll wrap. Hey, John and Jordy. I've been running a Fortune 500 tech company for about a decade now and wanted to get your take on the next jet I should purchase. I currently own a Gulfstream G650ER extended range, but have been thinking about upgrading to a Boeing business jet. What do you think I should go for? What do you think?

Look, I think it's less about the shell and more about what you do with the interior. And so I think whether it's a Boeing business jet and you want to be able to bring your potentially entire polycule or extended family or you're going, you're going to stay with the gulf stream. I would just think about, even if you keep your same gulf stream, redoing the interior on like a fairly frequent basis. Right. Because it's kind of like redoing the inside of your house. Like you walk in, it feels like this new, it feels like a new house even though it's the same, same kind of core shell or whatever. But really I, I would feel bad advising any one direction and would put a. You know, tell him to go talk to Preston Holland, expert on aviation, and he's our private jet guy.

I have a little bit more of a pointed take, so I think I know who wrote this in. And it's really about what your lifestyle is. So for those who don't know, the Gulf Stream is probably the most popular private jet. Bezos, Oprah, Winfrey, they all have of Gulf streams. The Boeing business jet is essentially a white labeled Boeing plane. So you can get a 737 Max. Like the thing that you fly on United, you can just have that privately. You can have a seven, you can have a Dreamliner. And a lot of heads of state have these, you know, Saudi princes. You can think of Air Force One as kind of a Boeing business jet, although it's owned by the military. Trump flies on a bbj, a Boeing business jet. But if you think about what, what's the difference between a CEO of a large company and a head of state? Well, the head of state is bringing an entire delegation to another country, lot of international travel, and always landing at a major airport. So you're going from D.C. to London. Those are huge, huge airports. When you're just a CEO, a, you don't need to bring your entire company with you when you go to do a deal. A lot of the biggest deals, it's just, you know, Zuckerberg and Kevin Systrom going for a hike. And so if they have to be meeting in Sun Valley, they can just fly in very easily. You don't need to worry about is the landing strip too small or too big so you can get to much more remote locations and still bring your whole family. And but for if you're thinking about, you know, running a political campaign now, then you need to be thinking about, okay, I'm gonna be in every major airport because I'm gonna be campaigning in swing states and they're all gonna have huge airports. So I can land and I can bring my entire staff, my entire team with me. And when I get off, off the plane, we're gonna hop in a bunch of black SUVs and I'm gonna bring my, my writer, my speech person, my makeup artist, my comms person, my finance. You're gonna bring the, my lawyer is gonna be with me all the time. And so you really need to think about, like, what your lifestyle is like and what it's going to be like over time before you make that decision. But I would probably, based on what I know, I'd stick with the Gulf Stream. But that's our show. I gotta hop on with Taipei soon. I think we're gonna wrap it up, so thanks for watching. Was that three hours?